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Remember the first time you rode a bike? Your first car? Your first kiss? The first time you do anything is usually a good topic.
My first kiss story is about a boy in my fourth-grade class. My family was moving from Queens to a Long Island suburb in the middle of the school year, and he walked me home across a frost-covered field on a cold winter's days in January. As we approached my apartment, he shyly asked if he could kiss me goodbye. A million years ago, and yet I remember his red-rimmed eyes, his runny nose, his trim little boy haircut from the fifties.
"Yes." I was surprised, but allowed it, then ran home to tell our housekeeper, Mrs. Mason, that a boy had wanted to kiss me.
When I give "The First Kiss" as a topic in writing workshops, many of the freewrites turned in involve slobbers and saliva, but no matter because that is what comes up.
I gave this topic in a workshop for divorcing women, anticipating that many would write about relationships with their exes. More than one wrote about their babies. I realized how preconceptions about a topic could stifle imagination. Once again, my students showed me a valuable lesson.
But the first kiss with a particular person may be sensual and romantic. Here’s an excerpt from a writer who went to Africa to study a village performance with deep roots in local culture. Each research team member had a local assistant translate from native to English and offered whatever help was needed.
The researcher who wrote the following was assigned Salifou as her translation assistant:
I had been thinking, I mean feeling, really, I mean fantasizing about Salifou’s lips for weeks. He has the most beautiful, sensual, thick lips, which I would secretly watch during interviews as he translated obscure passages to me in English.
What was behind that quiet facade—under his skin inside the calm? During meals, I would gaze at him eating fish and spitting, so elegantly and refined, the bones out through his soft, thick, sensual lips. I imagined what it would be like to kiss them, for my thin, white-woman lips to meet his strong, expressive African lips.
I pined at this for days. Imagined with curiosity for weeks. And then, there we were. Alone.
We were in my hotel room. I was sitting on the bed with my legs stretched out in front of me, and the laptop on my lap, and he, in a chair next to the bed. My hard drive was dying, and in my last moments of denial that this was happening just as my research in Africa began, I was patiently and shyly waiting for Microsoft Word to save some file, the translations, and transcriptions Salifou was helping me with.
I was waiting and probably complaining and waiting. That is when he leaned over to kiss me. I’d been waiting for this moment for what seemed like eons, yet, shy and startled, I pulled away.
My computer gurgled—the action I’d commanded it to do was still processing. Slower still, the death of my hard drive. I, without knowing which direction I should, would, could go, leaned over to him as if to say, “Yes, okay.”
And there in that strange hotel room in the finally private space, we had, away from bustling village life, our lips met. And it was juicy, beautiful, engulfing, tender, loving, pure, strong. I did not know it would lead to the melting of my heart. Disparate worlds merged. There was a whole world inside Salifou’s lips, in his mouth, in the sensual communication of our tongues that would change me forever. My hard drive died, and my heart was being born.
Sometimes our freewrites have natural endings; sometimes, they are snippets of scenes. And sometimes, they are just the beginning. Salifou moved to the United States to be with the writer, and eventually, they married.
The author continues to write this story.
