My First Kiss

I don’t remember what the weather was like that day. Nor do I remember what time of the year it was. It took me hours in therapy carefully calculating my life, just to remember which year it was. I do remember the place though – SM city Megamall, Manila, Philippines, approximately four hours flight from Corea. It was a sprawling monstrosity of commercialism established to feed off the money of the wealthy and the sweat, tears and labor of the poor. It was an eight hour trip from my home – Zambales; now with the construction of highways it take four.

             Usually my brother, father, mother and I would walk hand in hand looking at electronics we had never even dreamed of, and food that we were too poor to afford. But that day, on that particular day, a new movie was out that my parents really wanted to see and the rating was too high for my brother and I. Hence, we all walked together to a child/daycare center. It was colorful; I remember yellows and reds and blues, but mostly, blue. Most kids (in developed countries) have been to the sort of place I am describing; now they’re in every McDonalds and Burger King big enough to be titled “family size”.

             My parents, being as concerned as they were about our safety, even took a tour of the place and decided that it was okay after seeing the science play/learning center. It was, in their eyes educational, as well as entertaining. I will say that it was educational.

             The workers/babysitters there wore yellow shirts, polos, and one of them wore a golden necklace chain around his neck. His hair was immaculately parted down the middle and greased to perfection. I hesitate, but honestly have, to say that he was a stereotypical 불량배, what you call in English – someone who’s “good for nothing”.

             Soon after we met we exchanged ages but not names. “Hey there, what’s your name?” ~~~

             He was nineteen. He thought I was cute. Of course, all children, tend to be cute at this point. Some times, I wish that I had been somewhat ugly. He followed me around, helping me up and down slides, holding my hand when I was jumping off little child platforms, and when I would skip off to places too small and young and innocent for him to come with me – he would complain, whine and ask me to come back.

             Initially, he just annoyed me. I wanted to play with my brother but he kept leading me to blue and deserted tunnels where the light was muted and the sound echoed.

             I don’t know how exactly he looked at me. Maybe like a crocodile looking at a gazelle, teeth glaring in a deceitful smile, passing judgment whether it would be easy prey or not. Maybe he looked at me through a child’s eyes – jealous of my carefree-ness, my exuberance and happiness. Or maybe he looked at me with anger reflecting off of the disgust he felt towards himself. I do not know, nor do I care to know what he was thinking in the hours previous and in the split second it took for him to ask me “Can I kiss you?”, or was it, “Do you want a kiss?”. I do know that I thought him a strange man for asking such a strange question. I gave consent – for that was what it was to him.

             I had been expecting a quick kiss on the cheek. It was wet. And it went on for a confusing amount of time. I could feel his large and rough tongue probing my lips open – I did not open them. He pulled away and asked me whether I had ever been kissed that way. I gave the obvious answer. No. He laughed then grinned. Today I hope desperately for his mental health that the fleeting expression on his face had not been triumph.

             Maybe my child’s heart had been a little smitten with this teenager; but I agreed to the proposal to be his girlfriend. And I also agreed to walk with him into a small blue closet away from the prying eyes that did not want us to be together.

             My parents asked if I’d had a good time, when they came to pick me up. I asked them what the movie had been about. They answered that I was too young to understand, that it was only for adults. But I had had my first kiss – and they were too old to understand.

Copyright of Seongsin Kim. Infringement will be prosecuted.

Perhaps they met on a warm sultry day, the air around them laden with ideas and passions yet to be realized. Perhaps they met in the Fall, the falling leaves symbolic of the passing of their youthful ideas of romance. Either way, they met. Two young people at a mediocre college, on the brink of resigning themselves to the nine to five, coffee on Saturday mornings and movies on Saturday nights type of pleasant future.

He was a poor boy, not able to reach manhood, even though he was long past the time when boy turned to flint–eyed gentle man and girls exploded softly into soft–cheeked and cautious womanhood. His mother had died when he was young, leaving him only a prayer, a hope and a wound to live for and to live by. To pass into the threshold of adulthood, there must be certainty and a resignation to the life which would make you happy and content – not the one which would be exciting yet crushing. The boy did not yet want to become a man, for he had determined that he had not yet found a certainty that he would be willing to resign himself to. He was a poor boy. His inheritance wasted away by his older brother on the excuse that it was for his own good. Therefore, he owned one pair of trousers – army fatigues – that he had stolen righteously from his short journey of hard marches and harder tears.

She was pretty in pink, a vision to a general’s son who was at the time vying gracefully and furiously for her cool attention. Stereotypically like a rose and crudely like a winter storm, she had the softest of hearts and the iciest of smiles. To the eye of café and bar owners she looked too young and was endlessly carded, to the eye of her mother she looked too pale and too sickly, to the eye of her twin sister – she looked like a reflection. Luxurious clothes and restaurants whispered to her and she always reciprocated their beckons, the end result being that her family was no worse off and her fashion sense was fashion.

So the city mouse and the country mouse met, bristling at inherent differences.

He sang to her songs of romance and of bright-eyed, star-crossed lovers, yearning in his heart to be like them, the foolish people who knew nothing of the world yet everything of their hearts. The ways of the world were his artificial limbs – crutches he resented and spurned but were as much a part of him as his soulful music. His guitar was his most prized possession, I do not doubt that it had a name, but he would be too shy to mention it to his future children. It was plain and old, a secondhand piece of used up potential that only the boy could coax beauty out of. At night he would play at cafes and restaurants to plug the hole in his empty wallet and from there he would pour his heart out to his unsuspecting and indifferent soul-mate.

It is hard to describe his longing for the trivial, his wantonness in exploiting every comforting lie he could fathom, but his longings were futile – as he would find behind the spiteful and broken words of his future wife at his ignorance of the tradition of birthday cakes. And so he desperately tried to cleave himself to the most beautiful and jaded of the high society.

Their first meeting was somewhat of a dash to his dreams; she called him out, cussed him out, then emptied his wallet out – a dainty mini-sandwich and orange juice, Cha-Ching. At first it was all she could do to repress her morbid fascination of this stranger with long hair, a winsome smile and troubled eyes; but fascination eventually gave way to a softer curiosity at his unbelieving willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Their courtship was like that of a death match for him and a country fair for her. He fervently strung himself out on her occasional kindly frowns and on her more frequent raised and quizzical eyebrows. The boy had come to the ardent conclusion that if he could not have her, he would much sooner die – it is important to mention that he had not, up till this point, found a woman to heal the scars that his mother had left by her walk through existence. She, delighted in the way only ladies can be, quietly and searchingly drank in his every coarse usage of language and every delicate embrace he tried and failed to impart on her. And as must happen when two people make themselves indispensable to each other, they fought.

Perhaps they were scared, perhaps just annoyed, either way he stole her diary during this bleak yet colorful couple of weeks or so in order to find out her every appointment and engagement. Then, as if he didn’t know her frustration at its disappearance, returned it to its rightful pocket in her handbag while she had gone to the ladies room. She equally stealthily shed stoic tears of shame at her attachment and complained to her friends of his provincial ways. Seven years, they repeated this process, of longing and of ecstasy and of gale-like quarrels over pride and morality; and at the end of it not knowing what else they could do about the tedium of their happiness, joined together at a small church with a big band.

She came to uncover more and more flaws and the reason his eyes were troubled except when they loved. He came to understand the despair of believing in the unbelievable and chose instead to believe in her. They came to love each other at a terrible magnitude equal to that of an angry mob of idealists protesting against reality. So came I into this couple’s lives where the beast had conquered the rose and the rose the beast.

too much to ask

birth control