Sometime in 2019, I realized that my brain held onto information the best in list form, and so, at the bottom of my notes app, there’s a document that starts like this:
1. Jake
2. Caleb
3. Victoria
If I was organized enough to label things properly, I guess I could call it the kiss list. It’s almost a directory of my life from age 16 and on, a way of remembering things I did by the people I was with. My first-ever boyfriend, that guy from the weird club on St. Patrick’s Day weekend, my best friend. The time I got my hopes up or the time it just felt like the right thing to do. It’s a reminder to myself that sometimes a kiss is a question, a leap; sometimes it is nothing more than an answer, and not always the right one.
13: Micah
He’s a bad idea from the start, not that he was an idea I even had—two years older and part of a friend group I’ve just barely made myself a part of, and when we both end up crashing on the same couch after a party goes too long to walk home, I lull myself to sleep with a list of reasons why I shouldn’t think anything of it.
The list, which starts with “Alice, she has a crush on him” and ends with “Max, he’s asleep in the other room and still obsessed with me,” goes out of my head when I wake up at five in the morning to someone’s alarm and realize he’s practically holding my hand. The sky is a hazy early-morning gray and we’re half-asleep quiet, and somehow in the middle of it we shift from opposite ends of the sectional to pressed up close to each other. The kiss arrives without butterflies or sparks; it’s intentional and calm, every point of contact measured.
It’s exhilarating at first—he’s tall and gorgeous and talented, and I have no idea what he’s doing with me—and that only changes when we go back to sleep, this time his arms around me on purpose, and he whispers I want to see you again and then we can’t tell Alice into my hair. We wake up to Max’s eyes on me like a brand, red hot, from across the room. I hide the memory in the list in my notes app on my walk home so that I remember what happens when I let myself be selfish.
34: Mike
Mike kisses me before my seatbelt is on in the massive parking garage on Mass Ave. after offering to drive me home from dinner. It’s a good kiss, better than I’d expected. I’d made a habit of gravitating toward assholes, albeit pretty ones; Mike in his polo shirt is more polite than my usual taste. A week before our date I’d held a funeral, party of one, to mourn the end of a year-long situationship I’d had no business being genuinely upset over. Mike is the first step in my plan to find someone nice, even if nice means kinda boring. He wears khakis and works in tech sales and drives a Toyota so bland I forget what model it is immediately after I identify it. He is, in a way, not someone I expected to be a good kisser. Maybe it’s because he takes me by surprise that I don’t let it stop there. It feels the opposite of classy to sleep with a man after the first date, but it’s been so long since the last time I’d been on one that I forget what the rules are and let him follow me into my apartment, into my twin-sized bed.
We last a week longer, one more date until he drops me off at my apartment in his khakis and his Toyota and makes no move to follow me. I waste one more kiss on a goodbye, and I never see him again.
41 & 42: The hottest girl ever at Down, & John
The curve of her waist under my hand devastates me. We’re in a shitty club in downtown Boston and I’ve been drinking gin and tonics like my actions don’t have consequences that will haunt me in the morning. She has cold hands and her blonde hair spills down her back in a wave I’m scared to touch, for fear of getting swept up in it. Her lime green eyeliner was what caught me earlier, a compliment yelled over the music to a girl I’d thought was astronomically out of my league until she found me in the crowd and pulled me into her orbit.
She’s taller than me even in my platform sneakers, and in that single moment it is the best kiss of my life, better than the 40 kisses I’ve had before it. It lasts a fraction of how long I want it to—which is forever—and then she’s gone before I’ve processed the loss fully, over by the bar and then, eventually, world-endingly, in a man’s arms.
She kisses him and I force myself to stop planning how I’ll go up to her and get her name, get her number, get her to—I don’t know, propose to me? She kisses him and I allow a boy in a backwards hat to dance his way up to me. She kisses him and I let this new boy kiss me, even though he yells in my ear to tell me that his name is John and his hands are sweaty and I crack my eyes open to see where my friends are. In the car, once we make our escape, I add them both to the list, and allow myself one more moment of devastation over the fact that I only got one name.
45: Cole
Cole has a tattoo of a lipstick kiss on his hip bone, a fact that drives me to distraction long after his shirt comes off. We watch Ocean’s Twelve in his bed and drink red wine, taking breaks to eat fruit out of the plastic supermarket container and smoke out the open window into the humid July air. He tells me about his job at the crystal store and I nominate myself for an Oscar with how I pretend that I had no idea, that I hadn’t sent all-caps texts on the way to his place exclaiming how I was finally finally seeing cutie-crystal-boy Cole. I lose track of the kisses—the ones I press to his mouth and to that tattoo, the ones he leaves on my forehead and along my jaw like points in a constellation. We nearly die twice on Storrow Drive later that night, rain so thick we can barely see out his windshield, and I make him promise to let me know when he’s home safely. He seals the vow with a kiss, on the sidewalk in the rain like we’re in a movie, and I let myself feel every second of it, every spark. In spite of this moment, it isn’t until I see him on a different dating app five months later that I finally know he made it back in one piece.
51. Kay
I know before I even meet Kay that developing a crush is a bad idea. We match on a stupid app a month before she’s set to move over 900 miles away, doomed from the start, but I let her take me out anyway. She picks me up and brings me to her favorite restaurant, and I laugh more than I have in months over fruity drinks and food that I normally wouldn’t try but I eat without hesitation in an effort to come across as cool and unaffected and not someone who excuses her eating habits with some bullshit line about textures.
We make it back to her car after dinner and she looks at me from the driver’s seat and says “can I kiss you?” and… oh, fuck. She kisses me and I am in so much trouble—I’ve caught feelings in a way that feels like a tidal wave or jumping off a cliff, like there’s no coming back from it. She takes me home and we talk for hours, sitting close enough together that I can pull her mouth to mine whenever I want, which is all of the time. She drives me home at 2 a.m. and the highway is deserted because it’s the middle of the week, and I have work in the morning and she has to start packing up her apartment, but none of it matters because she holds my hand over the center console the entire time. She drives with her left wrist over the steering wheel, drumming along the top of the dash to each song that comes on with a practiced ease that shouldn’t be hot but has me distracted in ways I’ve never been before. At every red light she leans in to kiss me. I pull back when I notice it’s turned green, but she draws me back anyway. There’s no one else on the roads so it doesn’t matter when we give in and just linger, foreheads touching and matching ridiculous smiles on our faces in the middle of an empty intersection.
“Uh oh,” she whispers. It’s 3 a.m. and we’re standing on the sidewalk by her car, illegally parked outside my apartment. We have our arms around each other and I’m frozen, unable to comprehend how someone has come to mean so much to me in such a short period of time, especially when they’re leaving so soon. Uh oh, indeed.
It doesn’t last, because of course it doesn’t. By the time a month has passed since that night, we barely speak—by June, it’s gone completely quiet. It takes two weeks of the requisite sad music spiral I always go through when I get ghosted before I am able to sit down and think less about the ending and more about the moments of pure joy.
Maybe I need to split up the kiss list—do the math I don’t want to calculate and see how short it gets if I take out people I never touch again, how many stories get cut off before they hit any sort of meaningful conclusion. Maybe I’ll start to learn something.
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