I’m eight, my sister, twelve, and we sit on the couch of the neighborhood grandpa. He is not ours by blood, though he will soon scrape our veins, hackle our hearts, and bulge the minuscule vessels pinking the whites of our eyes. My memory is rearview on a night clogged with fog, but this is what I recall: my sister, arms and legs scrambling to get out from under, scattering sounds he’ll later claim he thought were giggles. I’m there, drinking Cherry Coke, forbidden at my own house, to scour away the slime of his tongue from mine and his slug-spit from my lips.
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The earliest reference of kissing occurs thirty-five hundred years ago in India’s Vedic Sanskrit texts. Two of the theories for this kind of physical touch: first, the skin of the lips is similar to the areole, therefore reflective of comfort and nourishment, and then the second, to facilitate the exchange of pre-masticated food practiced by our ancient ancestors. These theories likely factor into why some cultures kiss. However, only forty-six percent engage in this behavior. Instead of kissing, some cultures rub noses; others sniff cheeks, foreheads, or necks. Some flutter their eyelashes against another’s fluttering eyelashes. All of these practices exchange important social and biological information: Are you safe? Are you healthy? Are you mine?
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The last time I remember my mother’s lips touching mine, I was six or seven. Bored and baffled by the perpetual ambiguity of our priest’s sermon and homily, I’d asked my mother if I could receive communion. That wasn’t allowed, of course, but to stifle my fuss, she returned with the sacrificial wafer, its bone-white surface a full moon halved by her lips, and guided my mouth to hers. There was nothing memorable about the taste, but the texture surprised me. Weightless as a breath, it dissolved before the swallow. That’s the body of Christ, I must’ve wondered as I settled into my mother’s embrace through the final rise and be seated, her voice vibrating inside my own chest, her lips ushering forth each syllable of song as she tried to teach me the words. God was there that day, but not in the wine or the wafer.
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“You wouldn’t kiss and tell, would you?” the grandpa hissed in my ear before we left his house that night, but I dismissed his words—a kiss wasn’t what I thought happened. Until months later at the courthouse, the experience was filed into my memory with other gross things: my brother taking an enormous bite of my Toasty O’s, milk beads speckling his mustache; my father pinching off a sneeze then flicking away slick ropes of snot; my best friends swapping retainers on a dare. Our parents walked us home from the grandpa’s, giddy with each other after having a night together without us, and I remember my father snaking his arms around my mother’s waist, and the crick of her neck as she looked back to kiss him in a rare and short-lived exchange of affection.
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Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of a kiss: “touch with the lips as a sign of love, sexual desire, reverence, or greeting.” But its colloquial iterations are numerous. We kiss up to people we’ve wronged or want to impress. We blow a kiss when our lips can’t or shouldn’t touch. We steal kisses from people we don’t deserve to be close to. We say “kiss my ass” when it’s not at all what we mean. We kiss and make up. We kiss our mother with that mouth. We get or give the kiss of death. We get or give a last kiss. We kiss the sky. We do or do not kiss and tell.
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Though I hadn’t seen him do so for decades, after my mother was admitted into a memory care center with dementia, my father kissed her hello and goodbye on his daily visits. Her face was often smudged with food, lips cracked and crusted, but he never showed any sign of hesitation or disgust. He was better than himself in those moments—the man he must’ve meant to be but never was. Sometimes my mother would jerk her face away at the last second. It was during these times, perhaps, she was the woman she meant to be but never was.
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The thing of it is, I didn’t kiss and tell. My sister had helped me practice the words the lawyer suggested while we sucked on Fire Stix Jolly Ranchers to tame the gag. But when it was my turn, I said No to every question I’d practiced Yes to. My sister testified first, elaborately explaining what had happened to her, voice steady, eyes obsidian against stratus-cloud skin. What she said smeared all over my father’s face, cricked his body when he hugged her after her testimony so the smallest amount of him touched her. My mother, already a survivor, hid it in Kit-Kat bars, chocolate eclairs and late night Totino’s.
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Kissing, which uses one hundred and forty-six muscles and introduces eighty million new bacteria, serves as an exchange of your most intimate information. In an article in Bustle, Educator Candace Smith says, “When we kiss, we’re essentially sharing a tiny bit of our ecosystems—we’re swapping genetic information that our bodies unconsciously process—and in doing so, we learn more about each other in an instant than we ever could consciously.” I find this beautiful and terrifying. When a kiss is consensual, the information exchanged informs one person how to best help another survive. When it’s forced, it informs its recipient of all the ways it can destroy.
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Here’s what almost happened: moments after my mother’s death, I kissed her. In this last exchange of information, she told me none of it was my fault. She told me to forgive my father. She told me my sister never blamed me for not telling. She told me it was never too late to tell. She told me the world was so much more beautiful after the untethering. She told me her death would cleave me, but not to worry—she’d already given me all the knowledge I’d need to endure it. Here is what I have suffered, her kiss told me, and here is how I survived.