Rock Kissing

Over there, at an almost clean diagonal to the corner of the tartan rug I am sitting on, I had my first kiss. It was with the face of a jagged river rock and I was five or six years old. I remember the slimy viscosity of the face on my lips, and its sponginess on my hairless little arms as they bear-hugged it, and the effort the gentle rapids made to try and part us, forcing my legs to bobble out prone on the surface behind me. Suspended in the water, I remember feeling completely disembodied except for my lips, and hoping that all kisses made me feel like that.

Now I am twenty-one and I have taken her here for our first real date. I have not kissed her yet but have been unbearably close a few times. On the rug there are some salad rolls in a cheap cooler bag and also a bar of the organic chocolate she would always bring to school, and a bottle of orange juice. I have known her since year eleven. It is a beautiful afternoon and we can see a long way in either direction, towards the city and out to Eltham, my hometown, perched as we are on a little peninsula of weedy grass at the river bend. The barbecue area is close by. The cries of children die away quickly amongst the overgrowth and the trilling birds and the nostalgic murmur of the rapids. We start to eat.

“So,” she says after a period of silence, “Domesticated, aren’t we”

“Domesticated? But we’re out here”. I hold my arms out: beetroot and carrot spills from my roll.

“You know what I mean. The picnic in the park, the river, the picnic food”

“We can go somewhere else, if you want”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” she says. “I never said domestic was bad”

I bring up the efforts made by some of the theorists I’m studying at uni to stratify the naturalness of nature, from the remote wilderness to the planned city gardens that are called ‘domestic picturesque’. We agree that this place is somewhere in the middle and that it would be better if there was more middle around. I talk about the old man I see every day, sitting on the only bench in a slither of green in Flemington, which is where I live, who never seems to be looking at anything but who always seems to be really happy. I use him at an example of how nature, even the most unnatural nature, can do things to the soul. She doesn’t believe in souls.

“Humours, then”

“Humours?”

Soon we are lying down. The sky is full of particulate matter, atomised flowers, dandelions and pollen and other beautiful sorts of coordinates that remind me how even the most remote distance is three-dimensional. The sky is enveloping me and I have to sit up. Then I lie down again, closer to her. It takes every ounce of courage I’ve got just to grace the bare arm next to me with my fingertips. She takes my hand in hers and puts pressure on different spots. Our hands are playing of their own accord. She is humming a made up tune and making feminine sounds when she yawns. I feel as if everything she is doing and wearing and smelling like is for me. I want to kiss her; I can’t kiss her. I am going to kiss her.

But then I feel that I am about to break wind and hold it back, before another memory of this park comes to mind. This one makes me flinch, and look into empty space, and move away from her, nauseous. I was sixteen and had come to swim with my older brother and his mates. We had also used an old boogie board and a rope to jet ski someone idiotically around the parking lot a few times. I had fallen, hurt myself, but not badly, except that the fall had shifted my bowels and I could not reach the toilet in time. I had bolted towards the river and squatted in a dug-out hole on a little peninsula of weedy grass at the river bend.

“I think we should move,” I say

She looks down at the rug first and then towards the river. The frustration in her face is plain to see. “Okay. Maybe we should just go home”

“No, I don’t want that, I just think it’d be nicer downriver”. I stand and she stands and I kick the cooler aside and pick up the rug and begin beating off the dust and dirt, which the wind whisks away.

“But you chose this spot, you said yourself that this spot was the best one”

“I know, I know”

“So?”

I have to tell her the truth. That is, I have to tell her a truth. And so I tell her that I am embarrassed because when I was a kid I made out with one of the rocks in that little section of rapids that is at a diagonal from the corner of the rug. My expectation is that she will laugh at this, maybe even find it endearing, maybe even give me a pair of lips on which to redeem myself. But she doesn’t do any of these things.

“I don’t know if I believe you, James,” she says, downcast. “I don’t know if I believe that you want to be out here with me”

That is when I drop the rug and in desperation throw my arms around her. She doesn’t object. Neither does she seem to condone it. I feel numb, dismal, dissociated, kissing her: but I feel all right, too. It is as if she is another rock, a beautiful wedge of basalt maybe, and I am a child again, returned to the gentle waters, to that suspension of the bodily, and despite the likelihood of it being our last kiss I am not unhappy that it has happened this way.