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. |
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. |