The Kiss

She looked up. Or was it down. She supposed it depended upon which side of world you were standing on. The people in China, they would agree with her - she was most definitely looking up. And so, hanging upside down from monkey bars at the beach, she wished for the third time that day that she was Chinese.
The first time had been at lunch.
She loved Chinese food - but not the Panda Express kind, oh no. Her sophisticated taste buds dragged her to the fancy restaurants like a Y-shaped stick to water. (Not incredibly accurate, as far as location goes, but clearly looking for one thing and one thing only.) The eggplant was divine. So was the pork, and the noodles, and the spring rolls, and the everything. Man, she wished she were Chinese.
The second time that day had been directly following lunch, but it had nothing to do with the food. His name was Xiao, pronounced Shau, but everyone just called him Carson. It wasn't then that he had kissed her. It was, instead, four and half minutes later, when she leaned down to get her bag from under the table. When she returned to the upright position, she found that he was sitting right next to her. Very right next to her. Stoically, as if it were a rite of passage and he'd be damned if he wasn't gonna get it right, he placed his arm on her shoulder because that's how it was done, and he leaned in and placed his lips on hers. It was barely a kiss - more like an Eskimo kiss, with lips, without tongue, (without noodles), and it lingered. Having accomplished his goal, he stood up and they began on their way. And it lingered.
It might be fitting to say that he kissed her again by the payphone, and again behind the stairway, and yet again under the eucalyptus tree in his front yard. Instead it was as if time had rewound, and they had never eaten lunch, but were still filled with a satisfied, full, feeling. To the trained eye - namely, one who's had three daughters and knows exactly what's going on - it would have been obvious by their gait and feigned aloof attitudes, but by all Blockbuster standards, things had not gone as planned. He did not hold her hand. He did not kiss her goodbye. He did not invite her in.
What he did do was explain. She wasn't Chinese. He was sorry, but Mom and Dad just don't approve of socializing outside the race and, again he was sorry, and maybe he'd see her around. For a moment she just watched his face, and thought of explaining that they'd understand, and then that he could work around it, and then that the sidewalk was still that same gray color so he could just stop staring at it! But then, as she was momentarily fascinated by the grooves in the concrete as well, she simply wished she was Chinese for the second time that day.
Now, she stared up at the asphalt, watching it transform from black and rocky to a silky blond. She spent most of her afternoon (as any good teenage girl would) thinking about the kiss. She wondered why he'd kissed her, if it couldn't have meant anything. She wondered how it couldn't have meant anything if he'd made a point of kissing her. She began to remind herself of every reason he wasn't worth kissing. Unfortunately, her only conclusion was, for the third time that day, to wish that she had been born Chinese. For the kiss -- it was warm. And the kiss -- it was gentle. And, no matter how much chapstick she put on, the kiss - it lingered.


Every story has a certain amount of life-energy, but when the story is told again and again, the story-hearers become story-tellers, and little fragments of the tale get stuck under their cuticles, in the gaps between their teeth, and the crevices of their minds. So as a story snowballs through a network of people, bits and pieces of the available energy are held back, and its every slowly fades. Some stories, like Star Wars, are powerful enough to seduce an entire nation at once and, if it so desired (and as it turns out, it did so desire) come back twenty years later just to make a profit. However, the typical 'Becky & Joey' melodramas don't have quite the same mass appeal; maybe they lack a princess in distress, a planet or two, or a plot, but either way they can't afford to be passed on too many times before they evaporate into a mist of lifeless words.
Karolyn hoped these stories didn't have any future plans of grandeur, because she recycled them repeatedly the way people reused art supplies - even with such a easily exhausted life span, they were too fun and colorful not to take advantage of. She was quite a talkative girl but, fortunately for all the story-hearers, she had a very ear-friendly style. She'd tell you about anything - even tying her shoe that morning - but she used a crazy language of her own that was a thousand years farther along on the evolutionary scale than any other known language. Man, you really wanted to know how she tied her shoe, and why she felt compelled to tie them then, and wow really she ties her shoes before getting dressed (because, yes, she might just tell you that). Karolyn was the type of girl who could pick out and eloquently describe dramatic scenes in the clouds long after her companions had given up, exclaiming that this was dumb and they were just floating bits of fluff anyway.
Today, Karolyn hung from the exercise bar at the beach, barely swinging from her knees, and would surely love to tell you about how she looked up to watch her fingers drag miniature trenches in the sand and down to see the glittery stars on her socks. If you were lucky, and would stay a moment, she'd even roll up the cuff of her jeans to reveal the accompanying moon on her heel. However, despite her gregarious nature, she was subtly pleased no one had asked about her day. She had no audience to tell that a boy had asked if she wanted to play volleyball, or that he had sat cross-legged in the sand so that they were eye to eye between the bar and the sand, or that he had smiled twice as wide as she had, if you judge by the number of teeth showing. (She wished she had remembered to smile, but hanging upside-down in front of a naively-attractive stranger isn't exactly confidence-inspiring, so instead she chewed lightly on her bottom lip.) As the sun took its leave, she shared, with herself only, the story of the upside-down kiss he had left on her nibbled lip. It had been her first, she would embarrassingly admit if she was asked, but, luckily, she wasn't. Being both the teller and the hearer of this story, she alone possessed its energy, and she alone remained fully empowered by the potency of his kiss.

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