“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
Yesterday’s prompt got me thinking and writing about kissing. What was his name – maybe Arthur or Jay or Jared? I don’t so much remember his name as I remember the feeling of having opened the lid of a secret chest.
First tongue – so wet. So weird. I could not imagine why it had sounded so yummy in the books.
I had been reading “Fanny Hill”, a green paperback that I found under my mother’s bed when I was vacuuming (Mom always told me to vacuum under things; must have been a hint) and reading about many things I had little or no knowledge of. The thought of putting this thing here or that thing there seemed a lot like dinosaurs and galaxies and The Parthenon; fantasies that someone dreamed up and wrote stories about.
Someone else’s tongue in my mouth?
Are you kidding?
But there we were, outside the dance at the Town Hall, in the dark, him smelling of Old Spice and pressing his fuzzy upper lip against mine; me trying not to think about it while I felt myself warming to the idea. We were both shaking; I remember that too. And we got better at it over the summer, as though the ingredients had just been waiting around for the oven to heat up.
There have been quite a few things like that in my life – childbirth, child leaving, my first paying client, traveling to a foreign country, my mother’s death, graduate school, teaching a class – experiences that I had some book knowledge of but when it came to the real thing, I was emotionally unprepared and practically under-skilled.
And, like the kissing thing, I learned.
And then came today’s quote,
“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.” – Doris Lessing
Do I believe Doris Lessing?
I guess I do. Otherwise I do not know how to account for the way we move along from the blind and helpless place that we all begin in infancy, through the cluttered corridors of childhood and confused cacophony of early adulthood to land, one day, in some semblance of self-ness. A place where we can say, “I am this…” or “I don’t like that…” and yet at the same time knowing that, right around the corner may be the next “first tongue”.
That we never seem to have learned so much that there is nothing new left to learn.
This is what I love about life.
