Her thin, pursed lips, extending with hope in her eyes of "scoring". She wanted to kiss me. We stood on the platform of the New York City subway, Grand Concourse and 149th Street station in the Bronx. It would have been our first kiss. Wearing her "RED" Gap t-shirt, with her arm wrapped around the pole, she leaned in. I smirked at her and quickly backed away. In time, after our first kiss, she became my love in its truest form and eventually, my wife.
Our cheeks brushed against one another's and I felt the hot air seep from her lips onto my cheek. Her plush lips, painted with dark red lipstick, left a wet mess on the side of my right cheek. Her lips branded me with her temporary reminder, much like her presence in my life; I am her daughter. I am her legacy, her firstborn, her everything. I am the one picking up the broken pieces of her heart. The private verse public. The barbed wire. The children. The officers. The families. The criminals. And at our last visit, we hugged. My small hands embraced her, as they clung to the roundness of her back; she smelled of cigarettes and a body mist I could not place. I loosened my grip, my hands dropped down to my sides and her eyes teared up. It would be our final embrace. She kissed me, like she always had and this time, it would be our last. I am her daughter, I reminded myself as I walked away from her.
I wanted their newly born bodies to be pressed against mine, instantly connecting us, bonding us like no other kind of love. I wanted to kiss them both, from their foreheads to their toes. They are my twin daughters, the two little humans I gave birth to less than 7 months ago. I wanted my lips to be pressed against them, ever so delicately, reminding them they are forever mine, marked with love. I wanted my wife to feel their unconditional love and show them as much love as I was feeling for them all. As I lay there, on the surgical table under heavy anesthesia, she did. My wife held them, cuddled them, gave them the skin to skin time I wanted to but could not, she did. She kissed them, branding them, the kind only a mother's can.
The act of kissing is the ultimate experience of intimacy for me. It is a kind of intimacy not just reserved for my wife and I but attempts to deepen any relationship. For instance, when I met my wife, I'd only thought of kissing to purely satisfy one's sexual desires. When I met my wife, it was 4 months to the day of my mother's unexpected passing.
Before kissing my now wife, for me, kissing was about the private, it's something we did in the privacy of our personal space. As my mother lay there, in the ER after being rushed to the hospital, the result years of bad eating and crack-cocaine use, heart failure took her away. When I arrived in her hospital room, I could not bring myself to throw myself on her, hug and kiss her, plead her to come back to life; I could only reach out to touch her and feel her cold, blue fingers and toes. I didn't kiss her, I couldn't, my heart would not let me. Her spirit was gone, nothing within her would reciprocate my affection for her in that moment. After going through the formalities one does, to identify one's dead mother, I ran into the waiting area of the emergency room. There in his navy blue car seat, lay my now son, my mother's fourth child and technically, my biological half-brother. He was orphaned.
Isn't the presence of a beating, blood pumping, heart what is needed to give intimacy? To give a kiss "from the heart?" If my mother's wasn't pumping, she could not kiss me as she had done before, in the confines of the various correctional facilities she'd lived.
After her death, we were orphaned, permanently and figuratively, even though I'd felt orphaned years prior. Each time I went to visit her, in jail or prison; we greeted with a hug and said goodbye with a kiss on the cheek. A public exchange of affection between mother and daughter, a forbidden act, guarded by the corrections officers. The correct thing to do, the politically correct thing to do while in the visiting room, visiting an inmate, my mother, as it were, simply follow the rules. She would kiss me hard on the cheek. After all, she was my mother, she was allowed to grab my face, kiss my cheek and remind me she loved me. To her, that was affection. To me, it angered me. Her kiss. A kiss from a woman who orphaned me, who chose drug, money and men, over me, her firstborn daughter. Publicly, I kissed her in that visiting room. As I stood there, poised to kiss her, I knew that I loved her. And I kissed her to prove it.
I didn't need to prove anything to Dinushka, my wife. If I did want to kiss her on that platform after our first date, which I sooo wanted to, she would not have thought any less (or more) of me if I had accepted her advance. I waited. I wanted our first kiss to be private. Not so public for the world to see or at least the residents of the Bronx. I wanted to spend time, more time, getting to know her. I wanted to spend more time finding a kind of intimacy, exploring "the us" that could be and sealing that with a kiss. When we arrived to her apartment, take-out in hand, she opened the door for me and as I entered her studio apartment and her hand brushed against mine, our eyes met and we kissed. We held it for a few seconds in her doorway and then rushed in, fearful the neighbors may see and not sure how they would react to walking into the first kiss of a budding lesbian couple. Now, our kisses, after almost 10 years of being together, mean something much more. After three children, after buying a house, after supporting one another through obstacles and happy times, our kiss is reassurance. A "peck" is a reminder to each of us, I still love you even though a "peck" is all I can give with the energy I have in this moment. Our love has gotten us to the other side of that new kind of love...we are old by so many standards. And now, the way we kiss, where we kiss, how we kiss and in front of whom, proves we've grown as a couple.
We've grown as a family, as two women parenting our three children. We kiss them often. We tell them we love them multiple times a day. At times, those words "I love you," are followed by kisses on the soft brown cheeks of our infant daughters. For our son, he is too cool for kisses from his moms. We need to steal his, an in and out ambush of sorts. He will kiss us too...only if whatever request he asks (Can I have more gummies? Can I watch more television?) is granted, only then, will he warm our hearts with a kiss.