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Kisses I’ve Had in My Life
by Rebecca Gross
I walked through the double doors and kissed the bride square on the mouth. I had loved her since we were college roommates, and now she was marrying her boyfriend of ten years – an engineer with bad music taste and a daily pot-smoking habit. We would return from Thirsty Thursday and she would scrub her pale skin with Burt’s Bees face wash until her cheeks were raw with gentle tenderness. I dreamed for years of taking her earlobe between my teeth and letting her writhe with pleasure in our dorm room. On her wedding day, she tasted like vanilla and the skinny Korean cigarettes we used to smoke in college.
I kissed Patti Smith in my dream last night; I went as her for Halloween last week. Freud would tell me something about my desire to kiss myself. She smelled like incense and rotting flesh – I never light incense and I’m a vegetarian. Turn and face the strange: New York 1976.
He kissed me while I was passed out drunk on the top bunk in a stuffy room.I gagged up a small amount of vomit and let it run down the side of my mouth – In college, I didn’t learn much, but I did learn how to vomit everything up on command: My feelings, food and alcohol, the cocks of random men I fucked at parties. All the women I knew were familiar with this, with the pro forma purge of these toxic substances – an upset of the uvula, a jolt of the diaphragm, ritualistically ridding ourselves of the noxious decay.
At my grandfather’s funeral, I overshot my mother’s cheek and kissed her left ear, hoping she wouldn’t smell the cigarettes on me: Her father had just died of a condition in which his lung tissue hardened; each breath becoming shallower and shallower until no oxygen could be absorbed at all. The whole event upset me so much, I smoked the entire drive down from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
And tonight, I walk home the first night of the year it rains and take a drag of the cigarette I bummed at the party; it becomes soggy between my fingers.Rain in LA is much worse than the rest of the world gives us credit for; it’s true, it rarely happens, but when it does, the droplets feel much likelier to soak through. I take a left where I normally take a right and keep walking up the hill to reach the top of Mulholland, until I’m staring down at West Hollywood on one side and The Valley on the other. I take off one piece of clothes at a time and let the rain kiss my nakedness. I think about kissing back, but then I don’t.
Rebecca Gross (she/her) is a writer, editor, and researcher living in Los Angeles. Gross curates and self-publishes a zine called All Female Menu (Instagram @all_female_menu & Twitter: @allfemalemenu). She is also an English Literature Graduate Student and Teaching Fellow at Loyola Marymount University where she focuses her research on embodied trauma in diaspora literature. Find her at rebeccagross.com or on Twitter: @becsgross.