Kiss
With the gentleness of a freight train
June 26, 2003
The Iranian
Almost twenty and yet she had never felt the pressure of someone
else's lips
flutter against her own. When she was little, she would lie in
bed for
hours upon end, imagining her first encounter with Prince Charming.
She
would be enveloped in that angelic pink dress and his eyes would
sparkle
like a shooting star against the blackness of night. When he stepped
on her
toes, scraping her glass slipper, scuffing her favorite shoe,
sending her
belongings tumbling to the floor, she rolled her eyes at him.
Imperfection even followed her in her day dreams back then.
She rolled her eyes at him like he was nobody. She sighed a sigh
of
exasperation geared towards him as if he was just anybody. But
he wasn't
just anything. This is why she chewed furiously on her lower
lip in his
presence and nodded a nervous 'yes' when he asked to give her
a call later.
Her lip turned red, then purple, as if the sun was setting against
the
backdrop of her silken face. She was worried he wouldn't call,
crumple up
the paper she had scrolled her pink pen across, and play best
of three with
the trash can. She worried he would forget about her.
He didn't. Her heart skipped beats when the phone began to ring.
She
straightened her hair, took a deep breath, shoving out the negativity
inside her brain. She smiled in the mirror, blushing as if he
was watching
her. His voice warmed her entire being, touching that once-empty
place that
she had heard about and yet never had known existed.
Ten thousand minutes, seventy-nine phone calls, two hundred forty
seven
rings. Hours of laughter and tears. And then he had said it. Those
words
that had crushed her heart with the weight of the moon and pumped
it up with
sweetness to fill in the expanse of the sun. Her ears, her eyes,
her heart,
couldn't believe the simple words. She asked for him to repeat
it. He said
it again, "I'm gonna marry you one day."
She took more deep breath, trying to remember who she was and
what her
life had been before this moment. She shoved out all the remaining
negativity. She took another deep breath. Deep. Deeper, and deeper
again,
deeper than a knife wound, deeper than 10,000 leagues below the
sea. And
she exhaled for good, blowing out the twenty candles, the years
of
lonliness, missed dances, unpursued smiles, unheld hands, unpassionate
hearts.
"I Love You," he told her, and she was content,
for she had just
been kissed. He'd stood three feet away and kissed her heart with
the
gentleness of a freight train. * Send
this page to your friends
|
