Kiss

I play movies behind my eyes. Walking on auto-pilot, the reels play; step by step, scene by scene. Some would call it daydreaming, but these are not dreams, these are memories. It's like as soon as I plug in my Walkman the video begins. My eyes the projector it shoots from my brain. My rucksack hits against the groove of my back as campus crawls past me. I'm obligated to stay for the whole showing. After all, I am the host.

'My uncle says it's called a kiss' she breathes with excitement. That girl, the movie star of my memory, materializes in a blue haze. 'He says that mum and dad give them to each other all the time.' Beside her is conjured the frame of a boy, my recollection of myself - perhaps taller than i really was. I look down at my scuffed trainers. I didn't have the heart to tell my mum that they were too small as we'd only got them on the day before I started second grade and barely three months had passed at this point. My toes press against their edge, struggling to burst through to freedom. I am wittingly aware of the throb of my biggest nail.
'Does it hurt?' I ask, shuffling my feet into the orange dirt of the field. Our breath rises in murky flourishes as we speak. On another day we'd be holding twigs to our mouths, pretending to be our fathers on Christmas, or the teenagers we pass at the arcade. Inhaling the dirty scent of the twig and blowing it out again in a giggling rush, congratulating each other on how grown up we looked. But today was the day of the kiss. She'd told me last week that she'd show me. She had cried all day in class. Only I noticed, only I ever noticed her. I asked her at recess what was wrong but she said nothing, tears cascading down from her eyes. The wind whipped her faded golden hair, swirling it around her head like a tornado. Where it collided with her tears it stuck, making abstract artwork across her damp cheeks. I reached to a strand of it, partially attached to her blond lashes, and with all the delicacy my stubby hands could muster - brushed it away. At this she smiled. Faintly and sadly her eyes met mine.
'On Monday I'm going to give you a kiss.' Her eyes burned with a fury they shouldn't have possessed. It aged her. I was afraid of it, more than I was afraid of the kiss. Beyond the eyes her chubby cheeks flushed pink in the cold. Her mouth so small between them returned to it's frown. It wasn't enough of a move to be active, it seemed today her face just fell that way.

I was a sensitive boy, raised only by my mother I'd never learnt the skills necessary to engage with the other boys, to run, to climb, to punch. It was instead this girl who taught me these things, as best she could, the knowledge acquired from her brothers. She was too male to be one of the girls, I was too girly to be a guy - we made the perfect pair. We were all each other had, all each other ever needed. She was my salvation, the thing that saved me from my awkward disposition and social disabilities. I assumed we'd have each other forever. I didn't ask her what a kiss was, I didn't want her to think I was naive. Well, more accurately, I wanted her to think I was cool. I just blindly agreed. She said she'd meet me at our place at midday. The holidays had begun that week in preparation for Christmas. The winter day meant we only had a few stolen hours of sun to enjoy together before darkness fell and our parents required us in the light of our homes, away from the sinister night. I thought about the kiss over the weekend, between meals and video games it plagued my mind, as much as anything can plague the mind of a child with a three minute attention span. Our place was the field between our houses. I shuffled through the loose plank of my garden fence, she scaled hers - we met in the middle. It was tradition. We lived in a suburban haven, chosen specifically by our parents for it's low crime rate and high school results. Freedom was a given in the liberal age of 1980, our parents too busy trying to hold on to their lost youths to notice us endangering ours.

On the day my mind replays the field is eerily bare, no longer occupied by hundreds of thousands of wheat blades waving to us with the gentle breeze. Extra friends with whom to play hide-and-seek, concealing ourselves between their shielding hands. Now instead it is just us. Her, a dot on my horizon, and me, a blemish on hers. I am screamingly aware of the isolation of the moment. Even with her approaching. She is what makes me alone, her necessity to me, a necessity she is now exploiting with alien promises. When we meet after our brief exchange we say nothing more, just sink down into the dirt beside each other, our gaze set on the road at the edge of the field. Occasionally on other days we'd count the cars. It was a tedious game, what felt like hours spent awaiting the arrival of a vehicle just for the satisfaction of confirming we knew another number in the sequence we'd been taught. Where we sit the rain has collected in puddles before us. They stretch across the dirt like fluid dreams, creating floating lakes. Solid like mirrors they seem, reflecting the stretched sky above them. Clouds swirl in the stagnant water, trapped there, unable to escape to the desperate sky that is calling them home. Liquid mercury punctuated by blades of dying grass. I want to jump into the worlds those pools hold, be trapped amongst the sky within them - fester there eternally.

She turns to me, fire lapping at the edges of her irises. Hesitantly I turn too, my eyes telling the story of innocence, a story she no longer knows. She asks if I'm ready and I can smell fruit on her breath, a cocktail of multivitamins. She was always the queen of thieves as she stole them, smuggling them in the pockets of her pinafore, unaware of the good they do for her - deceived by the bright colours, the smiling characters, the fruity taste. She pops in another as I nod to her, unsure of why I do so as I've never been less ready for anything in my entire short life. I wince as she reaches to me, my thoughts trail to jabs at the doctors office - the only fear I'd ever known until this point. She places her tiny hand on my hot face, my cheeks flushing as the cold skin of her palm makes impact. Then her hand travels from my face to the front of the cord trousers my mum makes me wear.
'What are you doing?' I squeak, startled. She looks hurt as she reaches for me again.
'It's a grown up kiss. Do you not want one? You promised.' tears prick her eyes as she reaches for me again. I stand up abruptly and stare down at her on the ground. She is kneeling, dirt smudging her pudgy legs, mingling in with miscellaneous scrapes. Her eyes are hungry for something, cohabiting with a sadness that challenges the famine within them. She reaches a hand for me to take. It hangs there sadly, begging me for rescue.

That's the image I hold of her. The last image. I turned from her and sped back to my house. I keep that memory a secret, growing more angry with myself. When I saw her at school the next day she did not speak to me. I tried to plead my apologies but the ice on her shoulder would not thaw. She did not speak to me for the rest of the year, and then I moved, and she didn't have the opportunity to ignore me anymore. Equally I never again had the pleasure of being ignored by her. From what I heard she grew up too fast. She got used to being on her knees, not just in my memory but in her living life. The twigs we played with became real cigarettes between her lips, poisoning her lungs. Her fondness for vitamins became a fondness for narcotics. Her kiss a currency she used to get them. She died at the age of nineteen, in the derelict basement of a house no one lived in.

In my mind though she died that night, I dug her grave with every step away from her I took. When the memory ends, the curtains close briefly then a new feature begins. The life we'd have had if I'd taken her kiss. We fall in love clumsily, not quite sure what we're doing until it's too late and we're already enamoured. When I move we write letters, correspondence of commitment - in some pictures I don't move at all, maybe with a reason to stay I convince my mum not to take that job, not to marry that guy, not to leave my girl. She's unyeildingly happy, and we grow old together, never knowing the hunger for drugs and sex and numbness as she did when she died. If I'd kissed her I could have saved her. But I couldn't. I was just too young.