First Kiss

A story about a kiss...

I didn't know I was much of a romantic most of my life. As it turns out, I didn't know a lot about myself until I met Matt. It's funny how it sometimes takes the right person, or right situation to really help you learn about life.

When I was younger I had a plan. Graduate high school by 18, live on my own by 20, finish college and have my first kid by 25, and by the time I was 30 I would be set in my career. Never in my plans did it ever include find a boy, fall in love, and get married. Not that I did't like boys, I have been boy-crazy all my life. I just never expected to devote much time to them.

During the summer of 2005 Matt was hired at my work, at a children's portrait studio, and when he walked in, looking like a cross between Shaggy from Scooby Doo and Wolverine, I waged bets that he wouldn't last a week. I knew he would terrify the kids. Instead, he quickly became my best friend and confidant. And the kids loved him.

He met me at the beginning of a new relationship, and I met him as he was nearing the end of a big relationship. For 5 years he was the closest friend I had. We were even each others go-to-example in arguments against people who claimed men and women cannot be friends.

I loved him like a brother, a best friend, and as anyone would who had such a close friendship.

Then as 2009 came to a close, I had a dream.

The effect my dreams have had on my life are a novel unto themselves. My dreams throw an annoyingly serendipitous wrench into my affairs at random.

I cannot recall much of the anymore, but the nature of it changed how I thought of Matt forever.

I woke up and it was as if I had been completely rewired to think of him in a different way and all of those platonic feelings were shattered to dust. I couldn't hope to reassemble them if I had the eternity of time on my side.

Crap. I don't do well with a new environment in my head, so I went straight to the source of my disjointed state.

At the time, he worked as a waiter at a sandwich shop on my favorite strip of road in town, Broadway.

Broadway has this bohemian feel to it, very eclectic, and mixed with it is generations of my family making memories in its midst. Remnants of Playland sit in an abandoned lot where my parents would go on dates when they were young. Rickety old Kiddie Park still operates. Even when I was a kid the roller coaster looked questionable, but that was part of the fun. My grandmother had a friend in the later 30's whose estranged father sent her money to go to college, instead she bought a convertible car and my grandmother and her girlfriends would cruise the drag strip.

This road has been loved for many years and when you walk on its strip, you feel it emanating from the asphalt.

In I walk to the deli shop, hoping to catch my best friend for a lunch break, instead I hit the rush. So I order a sandwich and sit down to wait. All the time I cannot take my eyes off of him. He feels the switch too and comments later that he felt almost hunted by my eyes. I don't do subtle well.

Well, the lunch rush was never ending and he suggested we could catch up over dinner at our favorite restaurant across the street. This restaurant is, in my opinion, the best Chinese food on the planet, and no matter where I live, anytime I visit home, I beeline to them. And even if a year has passed since they have last seen me, I am always greeted with smiles of recognition.

I have had first dates here and post break-up consolation parties here, and numerous trips with good friends. Along with all of that history, this restaurant keeps a piece of my heart.

My best friend finally gets off work and we sit down, barely taking a second to look at the menus —we already know what we are going to order. Actually, we can practically order for each other and a handful of other friends who regularly come with.

Their wonton soup is the best. Think wonton soup meets the coziness of chicken noodle soup. Plus, they don't stuff their wontons, which I vehemently appreciate. (In stuffed wontons I always wind up with gristle or something with an odd texture in my mouth. Yuck.) Many times when I was sick, their wonton soup was the only thing that sustained me.

As we get our food I begin to stammer, hem, and haw around the subject because now after feeling weird all day, I just feel like a fool.

And he leans on the table, with his arms folded in front of him and chin on his wrist. He looks up at me with that sideways smile and says he knows something is up and I should just spit it out.

Finally, with enough prodding I tell him the whole darn thing and how my dream has tried to wreck my life and our friendship. With immediate confidence he tells me not to worry, he won't let anything happen and nothing will ruin our friendship.

The problem with his logic — I have a stronger will than he does.

So dinner passes with us laughing about it, me being awkward and twitching and him bemused by my peculiar antics.

Now as fast as I talk, I think even faster, and up bubbles a memory of a story my mom told me about when she was in college.

When she was single, she had a friend she enjoyed hanging out with. They decided to go on a date and when it came to the first kiss, they giggled as no sparks flew and they realized they were just destined to be friends only.

Light bulb. I had a plan. But, I had to percolate on it to make sure it was foolproof. Turns out I am bad at making fool-proof plans.

By the time we had paid for dinner and were sitting in my car talking about the makings of the universe, I had decided this was my only option, we had to kiss so I could go back to normal.

I shared this idea with him and we discussed it at length, with neither of us willing to make the next move.

My frustration grew with my lack of taking action and I expressed it. Then he reached over and kissed me.

What happened next obliterated all of my stubborn thoughts that we would go back to being friends.

My body went from confused and frustrated to being set on fire and all of my senses reacted to that kiss.

I felt as if someone had hit me with an epi-pen of pure amorous instinct and his mere breath as alluring as the smell of a lit match to a would-be recovering smoker.

An eighteen-wheeler could have exploded behind us and we wouldn't have noticed.

I never understood the phrase 'being swept off your feet' until this moment.

The kiss lasted only a brief moment. He and I exploded off of each other in absolute confusion, previously convinced of the outcome, as sure as any mathematician is that two plus two equals four.

And then, as if we were cast in some odd Woody Allen film, we spent the next five minutes trying to analyze what just happened.

This was too big to understand and we wanted to put it back in a nice, neat box. As we discussed what could have possibly just happened, a gravitational pull had created itself toward one another and before we could stop it, we were locked in an embrace yet again.

This pattern of emotional pull, shock, then over examining happened repetitively for at least an hour. Finally the time arose that we had to leave in order to wake up for work the next day.

As he left the car, he jumped back in and stole one more kiss. His last words to me were, "Just in case I don't get to do that again."

I'm not an easily moved person, but that sentence brought me to the verge of crying, and the memory of it makes me tear up anytime I re-live it.

My world was shattered, the sky wasn't blue, down was now up, and I was utterly confused. I spent the next year forcing myself to wake up to the reality that something that good couldn't happen, the gods of fate or luck wouldn't allow it, he spent the next year proving me, and my opinion of fate, wrong.

Two years later, we drove into the parking lot to go eat at our favorite chinese food restaurant and when we walked back to the car, in the exact parking spot we had first kissed, we took pictures of the "Just Married" graffiti painted all over the back windshield.

Sometimes things that shouldn't exist, do. And sometimes you have to have the guts to believe in it, even when it doesn't make sense, or you will miss out on a lifetime of happiness.

September 22, 2012 Happy Anniversary, my love.