First Kiss

What could have been.

After the kiss, I was shocked. I expected: love, a future together, a boyfriend. I imagined us together. I thought back upon our conversation, and the raw depth that had drawn me to him in this careless frat mixer I had entered expecting nothing: his hard childhood, independence, dealing with loneliness, his passion for architecture, his desire to learn languages, his desire to have kids and wanting to provide a good childhood, thinking that is beautiful. Us leaning against the cars, away from everybody else and their shallow beer pong and conversation, talking. The frat guy, the Asian one, coming over to ask him to stop leaning on the car, then him going right back onto leaning on it a minute later because he had had a full bottle of champagne; we laughed about it. The lighting in the back yard, repeatedly hitting his eyes, giving me a glimpse into the clear brown.

Him repeating “I’m so attracted to intelligence”. Us going to the architecture studio at 11pm because he had a model due tomorrow. His classmate, Jaclyn Park, watching me pour water on his head, him asking me to slap him harder on the face to sober him up, so he could work on his model; refusing and laughing and eventually giving in as he said, “harder”, “harder”, “harder”. Helping him tape wood pieces carefully, lining glue along the diagonals to create his delicate art. The darkness as he walked me back to my dorm at 12am. Looking up at him as I walked beside him, the sharpness of his jaw, the softness of his eyes.

Then, sitting on the couch outside before we said goodbye, looking up into the night, the moon, the peace, occasional students passing by. The lit storefront of Insomnia Cookies. The stripes on his navy shirt. Asking: “do you do this often with girls?” Him: “No. Not at USC. Not ever, I think.” Then: “My hands are cold.” “Why don’t I warm them up?” The feeling of stubble on his cheek, pressing the back of my cold hand against his warm face, caressing his rough fingers, the hair on his hand, his arm around my shoulder. The drawl, the soft and relaxed drawl of his voice. “I think making a child out of your love…is the most beautiful thing. Sure, you get a bit fat, but that’s cool.”

Then, the kiss. Shocking. His lips. Warm. On mine. Not gentle, not romantic, not soft; just the reality, the concrete reality, of his lips on mine. The kiss was physically unpleasant. But it awoke in me the hope of something more. And that hope, that simultaneous mingle of hope and fear in my chest, was what stayed with me, what bothered me, what made me smile, what kept me from sleeping for the nights after.

The next time we met—2pm, light of day, outside Dulce—everything had changed.

I noticed the stain on his old sweater; the slight crookedness of his teeth; the creases of age in his face; the roughness of his skin; the slight bent in his shoulder; the scent, but no longer romantic, of his breath. The awkward hug in the beginning and end. Our conversation was—meh, okay. He talked on and on, sometimes without asking me questions as much as I liked. But perhaps he had sensed a difference in me, a closed-off quality, that he talked to fill the silence. The stuff he talked about: a girl who liked him but he hated and had an abortion at 13, the frat guys, going out to have fun, “Linked-incels”, not being quite innocent, his mom being a hoarder, the architecture at USC being boring. Mundane things, random things.

He never made me feel “ick”. But the fact that, I had washed my hair and put on makeup and put on jewelry to look nice, but he wore a sweater that he had thrifted for $15 yesterday without washing, and talked like he didn’t care, and had no shame in the night prior, slapped me awake to the reality of the man who was in front of me, sober and real, compared to the picture of the man I had painted in my head from 4 drunk hours in the dim-lit starlight and backyard of a frat house.

“For you, it’s your first kiss, so it’s significant”, My friend Tatienne later told me. “Pour lui, bah, c’est rien du tout”. For him, it’s nothing at all.

A part of me had hoped he liked me enough to give it another try—but I knew that we both knew. I texted him at 8pm that night, after receiving no text. “I enjoyed our conversation, I hope we can put the other night behind us and stay friends”. Soon, he texted back: “Haha yes same, I enjoyed the conversation and look forward to seeing you around”.

Was this all? Was it finished?

His name had been Chance. The name I had talked with my roommate about first semester, long before meeting him, a crazy coincidence. We agreed it was the perfect name, on another level. It had a different ring than Charlie or Chris. “Will you give me a chance—” he had joked in the dark, on that couch, below the moonlit night at 12am, minutes before kissing me, “ —will ya?” and for a moment, I had wondered if he was being serious.

In the days after, walking through campus as students quietly shuffled by me, I noticed the details in the architecture in a way I didn’t before. Small sculpted animals in flat white stones on the red bricks. Chips in bottoms of stone columns. Roman letters inscribed on top. I knew I would always pay more attention to the details of architecture---the color, the sculpture, the shape---even if I tried not to. And, for the first time since coming to college, USC architecture struck me as mundane. From a distance, it had previously been picturesque, grand, magical.

I kept walking until the feeling softened into something I could not name.