Two Two Eight: Kiss

Rainy nights in late winter are a time for watching ghosts in the mirror. On rainy nights here I can look out to the river and feel melancholy wash over me.

I was thinking about kisses today. A kiss is a simple thing, and sharing kisses is how most of us first began to learn to be a lover.  A kiss is a first step in the dance, a first touch of flesh and breath. It's easy to think about kisses tonight, to think about places where I've kissed lovers for the first time. A parked car, the terrace of a bar, the rooftop of a residence hall at university. Walking hand-in-hand through a street of small, hip shops. In the doorway of a Long Island Railroad car.  At an arrivals gate at an aerodrome. Each kiss is a gateway to stories, to pieces of my life, to the faces of lost loves in the mirror.

I remember a girl turning to me in that train car doorway and kissing me hard and saying, I love you...or something.

I remember a rooftop bar on a late-September night, with Talking Heads' "The Lady Don't Mind" playing on the sound system--- looking out at the city lights and then half-turning to kiss the girl who was pressed against me.

I can remember those things tonight. But tonight I am feeling my age, and I'm feeling aware of how time runs out. I'd love to hear that Talking Heads song again. The rains are coming in from the north and west and it does occur to me how long it's been since I kissed anyone. What's going through my mind is that I've forgotten how to kiss.

Once upon  a time, a Young Companion kissed me for a while in a doorway and told me that she'd never been kissed like that, and that she understood why girls liked older men, why girls she knew liked kissing me. That was a long time ago now, and I lived off that one compliment for years and years.

I may just talk about kisses for a bit. There are ways to talk about kisses without feeling ghosts in the air, and I have to find those ways.

Let's just admit that I've always liked kisses hard and deep. I've liked sharing breath and wetness in  a kiss. I've loved the games of passing an ice cube back and forth in a kiss 'til it melts. I've liked sharing a mouthful of champagne in a kiss.

Long, long ago, far back in another century, I first read about sharing wetness in a kiss. I didn't hear the old term "swapping spit" until I went off to university. But I do recall reading about characters in novels sharing saliva in a kiss. I know that a couple of years ago there was a whole thing in porn videos of characters spitting in one another's faces or into each other's open mouths. That's a more deliberate thing, and it traffics in the idea of humiliation more than domination. But what I was thinking of tonight was a particular book, a novelization of an Italo-French erotic film from the early 1970s, something not-quite-hardcore called "Female Animal". I can't recall where I found the novel, though it was almost certainly in some used-paperback store, the kind of place that had its shelves and tables stuffed with yellowing mass-market paperbacks for twenty-five cents each. I don't recall if ever I saw the film version of "Female Animal", though I may have. I remember the "novelization", though. The cover was white--- I remember that ---with the image of a topless girl, her breasts hidden by long, straight hair. She was holding a large cat to herself and trying to look sultry.  The cover was taken from the poster from the film. I have no clue at all who the actress was. I suppose she'd be in her sixties now--- a memento mori thing to realize.

The plot of the film (and its novelization) was simple enough. It was set on the Italian Riviera, and the heroine was a village girl of seventeen or eighteen who was desperate to leave poverty and boredom behind and go off to the bright lights and high life. I suspect that it was called "Female Animal" because there was a fairly brief passage where she's alone in bed and unable to bring herself to orgasm and coaxes her cat into licking her. I have no idea how that was handled in the film.  What I do recall is that the author always describes her sharing saliva when she kisses anyone.

I read that, read about the character's kisses, and resolved to try that with someone very soon. The first girl I did do that with squirmed and made a face when I passed saliva into her mouth, then passed her own back to me very deliberately and intensely. I remember how it felt, and how amazing it was when I was young.

These days, though, I find myself freezing up with worry that I've forgotten how to kiss, that I've lost whatever sense of timing, pressure, rhythm, use of lips and tongue I may ever have known. It's Carnevale season here in my city, and it's a time for masks and kissing strangers on parade-filled streets, and I can't imagine kissing anyone this season. I really do think I'd be afraid to kiss anyone, afraid to try, afraid of not being able to kiss to any effect, afraid of no longer what to do.

I suppose it's the rain that makes me think of these things.

Two Two Seven: Ink

I have been trying to imagine writing a love letter again. It's not an easy thing. I've always had a good eye for ritual, and I've always been able to lose myself in rituals. It's hard tonight, though, trying to imagine writing a love letter.

I've told you how it should be done. On good paper, always. At the very least, you should use hotel stationery, preferably a good hotel in some city far away overseas. Good paper, though, is always best. Something purpose-made for serious correspondence.  Heavy envelopes, too. And a wax seal.  There are people who'd tell you that a wax seal is pretentious, but I think they're wrong. The seal is archaic, but deliberately so. It says that something is personal and private, that whatever's in the envelope is private and valuable. There should be something satisfying for the recipient, too. When she breaks that seal, she knows that she's seeing something that was for her and her alone.  You should always use good ink. That's a given. A fountain pen and good ink. It should be a pen you have to think about, a high-end tool for something important. You need to feel the pen when you write, to feel a sense of doing something that matters. The ink itself should be, well, not just black or blue. I do mix my own--- blend inks to get a colour that means something to me, a colour that reminds a lovely girl of me and what I am.

I can imagine those things. I can imagine laying it all out--- paper, pen, ink. You can write a love letter at a cafe, or in the reading room of a good library. Home is best, though. Easier to have the right music when you're at home. Easier to feel a sense of intimacy, too.

I'm not sure that I could do it tonight, even if I had someone to send a love letter to. I'm not sure what I'd say. I'd be afraid that any statement of feelings would be considered manipulative or coercive. Something simple--- I want to take you in my arms and kiss you. I want to feel you next to me in the morning. Something simple and basic and ordinary. But here in the age of the gender wars, couldn't it be made to sound coercive or threatening, even if the recipient was someone who'd shared your bed and who'd told you that she felt desire and affection for you? If you tell a lover (or a hoped-for lover) that you'd like to go places with her, do things with her, see the world with her, aren't you demanding her time? I read a piece online not long ago where the author was horrified at the idea of asking someone out. You were asking for someone's time,  he said, and for his generation, nothing was more carefully-hoarded or valuable than time. Asking someone to make time for you, to do something they weren't work-obligated to do, to do something they hadn't thought of themselves...wasn't that coercive and "entitled"? More--- asking someone to do something, asking at any time, was saying that you didn't think their own lives were already filled with important things. It was asking someone to expend time and emotional energy in reading your letter and in having to actually go out and deal with people.

There are other fears, too. A really passionate love letter could seem emotionally overwhelming. And the recipient could all-too-easily read it aloud to her female friends and mock you. I think--- or I'd like to think ---that no well-brought-up young lady would've done that in Jane Austen's day. I'm not sure I'd trust a lovely recipient not to mock me to her friends now, and that fear leaves me empty and sad on two levels--- that someone might do it, and that I'd be the sort of person to imagine her doing it.

In all honesty, I can't sext. The format is just wrong--- it's not a format I'd be any good at.  Texts are too short, my typing too inept. I don't have the room to craft fantasies. And, yes, I think of texts as too easy to spread out to people who'd laugh or be disgusted at what I'd sext to someone. I've always had an imaginary audience judging me, I've always tried to avoid the derision of the imaginary judges in the audience.

Tonight I'm looking at my collection of fountain pens and bottles of ink and wondering how you go about telling a lover (or hoped-for lover) about what you like, or what you want, or what your feelings for her are.  What ways do we still have, here in the age of social media and the gender wars, to do any of those things?