It’s easy to get enveloped. The kiss is like drawing the blinds.
–AnonThe pull on my flesh was just too strong
Stifled the choice and the air in my lungs
–Mumford and Sons/Broken Crown
The other night, I was chatting with someone online. The subject of sex came up, like it does, and we talked about getting carried away. There are a lot of stories in my history about getting carried away, losing track of what I was doing and where. It goes way back. Clothes get pushed aside or taken off. You find yourself doing things that you don’t think you would normally do in public.
And it starts with kissing.
It’s this alchemical reaction. Someone pushes your hair back, touches your neck. You like the way they smell. You like the way their skin feels. Then they kiss you. Sometimes, most of the time, almost always, that is all there is. Kissing. Regular kissing. It’s..nice. It’s…fine. It’s…enjoyable. Sometimes, though, it’s sparks and heat and the breath catches at the back of your throat. Maybe you remember saying something like “ohhh” and then there is a click. Your conscious brain shuts off and everything goes elemental.
And it is all there is. Taste, touch, scent.
Sensation. There’s a word to think about: sensational. Full of sensation. We don’t use it that way very often, but it’s perfect for the kind of kissing I am talking about. Ever notice how close together your mouth, nose and ears are? It’s like all of the sensory organs are crammed together specifically to cause sensory overload during kissing of the sort that causes you to get carried away. So many sensations happening simultaneously that your brain turns off unnecessary distractions like modesty and judgement.
Like pulling down the blinds. Suddenly it doesn’t matter if you’re in the front yard, at school, in a car. All that there is is sensation. Taste, touch, smell, sound. You stop noticing anything else. You don’t think, you just feel.
Biological imperatives rule.
And there is a sense that we tend not to use when we kiss..most of us kiss with our eyes closed. Like one more sense added would cause such an overload that everything would have to stop . Or maybe it’s just because our eyes are too close together to focus when we kiss. Eyes closed, it’s like meditation, only instead of your own breath you hear his. His heartbeat. Fingers entwined in hair. Mouths, tongues and teeth. Hands on skin.
It’s a good thing we’ve learned how to prevent reproduction, not that I will be able to do that for much longer.
Kissing really doesn’t get enough credit when people talk about sex. For me, if the kissing doesn’t work nothing else will. Everything starts with the brain, and ends with kissing. If the kissing is right, usually everything else is too. If it isn’t it can be fixed. You can’t fix incompatible kissing.
It always seemed like such a teenage thing, but I have never outgrown it.
I hope I never do.