My first kiss was on a dare, so technically it doesn’t count. Everything around us was gray—ash colored snowflakes melted placidly onto the dingy pavement outside the middle school—it was the last day before Christmas vacation.
We spun awkwardly, and then his lips pressed against mine so tightly that my teeth cut into the soft flesh inside my mouth. It felt like my soul was sucked out of my body and pinned to the overcast sky. The metallic taste of my own blood mixed with something else, an emotion I hadn’t anticipated: apathy. It scared me. I thought it was somehow my fault. I didn’t let him kiss me again, but he also didn’t try.
My second kiss wasn’t until six years later, on my front porch after a date. I had hoped it would be better. I had hoped that when our lips met I wouldn’t break into a cold sweat. I had hoped that there would be butterflies inside my stomach instead of stones. I had hoped that I would feel something, anything. Joy, bliss, lust, anger, disgust. Instead I felt empty.
I asked him to kiss me again and again, pausing between each one like I was directing a movie. Part your lips a bit more, less tongue, cup my face. Instead of fireworks, all I could see in my head was an infinite checklist of information I’d gleaned from years of reading the kinds of magazines that profit from insecurity. If Cosmo was my textbook, then I was a chemist—testing hypothesis upon hypothesis, praying for a reaction. There were too many independent variables, and they swirled around me in an angry vortex. One tweak of the tongue, and maybe if the lighting is just right, and the snow is sparkling in the nubile trees of late November, and he loves me.
Maybe, I thought, if I could just get everything right—align the planets, calm the seas, sacrifice my beating heart to Venus herself—I might enjoy being kissed. Not kissing, I wasn’t participating enough to have that kind of agency, but being kissed, getting kissed, I could get behind that. It never occurred to me that what I was feeling had nothing to do with the weather, or head position, or music, or whether it was a waxing or waning gibbous moon, or me. It was chromosomal.
This realization didn’t happen overnight; there was no parting of the heavens, no sudden shift in paradigm. It was hard work, a true labor of love. Laboring so I could love, so I could be loved. I excavated this ancient artifact in a cave full of dripping stalactites. Bit by bit, I carefully chipped away the calcified mass of compulsory heterosexuality surrounding the glowing gem buried deep within myself. I held my newly freed heart in my hands and asked her what she wanted. I let the cacophony of bad advice fade into the background so I could hear her response. It’s chromosomal, my dear.
My real first kiss, the one I reclaimed, was everything I wanted but couldn’t manifest on my own. Her lips locked around mine like a suction cup, and I sat there like a dead fish. Despite the objectively bad mechanics, it was perfect. My heart swelled, the earth stopped spinning, and every single cliché about romance that I had ever scoffed at came true in an instant. We didn’t need stage direction, there was no need to agonize over hypotheses, so I let my safety goggles fog up. In that moment every celestial body clicked into place, and they haven’t budged since.
