If You Kissed Me

Thomas Leuthard

If you kissed me, I would follow you home.

I would know that it would be a bad idea — and make no mistake, it very much would be — but I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I would feel everything that I’ve been trying to pretend I don’t for so long bubble to the surface, boiling over like a pot left on a few minutes too long.

You would put your hand on the small of my back and suddenly it would be the only thing I can feel, the only thing that is real and meaningful in the world. Just that hand on my back, and everything else would kind of fade away. After all, what would any of this matter if you were kissing me? How could the dull, muted world around me find meaning when compared to the electricity of your touch?

I would follow you home. You would open the door, and I would have to stop myself from leaping for joy. I would have to pretend to be less excited than I was, pretend that I don’t need you the way I have needed you for so long now. You would offer me something to drink and I would force myself to accept, even though I would already be drunk from the butterflies in my stomach.

Have you ever noticed how beautiful your lips are? How soft, how gentle, how they curve up slightly when you smile and so rarely open up in that wide-mouthed grin that we are so quick to associate with earnestness? I love your little half-smile. It is like everything else about you, never overdone.

If you kissed me, there would be nothing else I wanted. I would feel like the child who realizes at the very end of Christmas morning that the gift he had been waiting for was under the tree all along, and now everything else can fade to a pleasant hum in the background of his joy. You would be that gift, that shiny thing wrapped up under the tree with my name on it. I have wanted that kiss for so long, so long that I believe I can feel your lips against mine even when you are a hundred miles away.

Of course, I don’t actually know what they feel like. But I imagine they are perfect.

You would be the person I had always dreamed of you being, the person I watch when they don’t realize it and are doing something completely silly, yawning like a puppy in the sun. You are the most wonderful person, full of life and curiosity and bursting at the seams with love. I want to catch some of it as it radiates outward; I want to be in its presence. If you kissed me, I would finally know what that felt like.

But I know that it won’t happen. I know that you won’t kiss me, that this isn’t meant to be. And it’s probably for the best, because when we are only together in my dreams, there is no way you can disappoint me.

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