These Are The Moments I Crave When I’m Kissing You

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His face comes close against mine and although we are in the dark, it is like I can see everything by his steamy breath that warms my lips. The room is quiet, deserted by half-naked bodies and sloppy secrets, and containers of intoxicants absorb the moonlight that streams in from the window. The room ruminates in the ghosts of chaotic liberation. The glass bottles of stolen Smirnoff, now emptied of their mirth, patiently await the morning sunlight to beckon forth the day-after hangover, the glass-boxed regret, the easily-broken resolutions, the pain. Maybe someday we will see the true effects of commercialized poison, but today is not that day.

Today, we live for our freedom. We live for now.

We live for the electricity-charged air that catches our slurred words. We live for the bursts of laughter that escape the locked caverns of our souls. We live for us. We live for I.

I lick my lips. I pull oxygen into my mouth and rest my flushed ear against his chest, listening for a heartbeat. I can see myself through tunnel-vision and the outdoor light highlights my hair, my alighted irises, my slightly parted lips. I turn my head and lift my chin a little, a mere nuance of position, and our breathing begins to coagulate. There is a word hidden in my ear, my subconscious pulsing it like the one message my brain must receive before shutting off.

It says: now.

If you’ve ever kissed another human being, you know that the moment before contact is the most urgent, the most quiet, the most anticipated. It is the last inhale before diving under water. It is all momentum. It is all impulse.

Our lips meet and the gentle movement becomes rhythm. We are lost in feeling and instinct and response. I throw myself into passion and I focus on cultivating the heat between our mouths. Rhythm becomes heat and air, rapidity and slowness, feeling, feeling, feeling.

Let’s forget the darkness that consumes our hearts. Let’s forget the rationality and consequences. Let’s forget the days we couldn’t get out of bed because of heavy hearts. Let’s forget the in-between moments that strangle and suffocate. Let me feel again. We are here now.

We live for now. We live for us.