There is something I cannot remember correctly.
And that should comfort me.
Instead, it does the opposite.
I do not remember the kiss.
I remember trying to reconstruct it afterward.
For a long time I believed those were the same thing.
Now I am no longer sure.
I can describe the temperature.
I can describe the pressure.
I can even describe the exact moment I stopped breathing through my nose.
What I cannot describe is something much smaller.
I do not know when I decided not to pull away.
And that absence haunts me more than anything else.
I have revisited that memory too many times.
Each time I find something different.
In some versions I try to move.
In others I am already still when it begins.
In some versions I am still afraid.
In others it feels as though I am waiting.
That difference should be insignificant.
But it is not.
Because if I am waiting, then the story changes.
And I have spent months trying to prove to myself that I was not waiting.
The most shameful part is not the kiss.
It is the suspicion that my memory keeps correcting it.
As though it is still trying to protect me from something.
Or accuse me of something.
I still do not know which.
My neck I am not moving it the record cannot close I should…
