When the weather turns warm the park transforms into a runway for young lovers. Teenagers lie on the grass, entwined like colorful vines.
Sitting under a pink flowering tree I put on my headphones and hide behind my sunglasses. Hiding so that I can spy.
I spy with my little eye:
Two girls, both wearing checkered Vans and paint splattered jeans. They giggle and kiss, then curl up together, the long unicorn-hair girl lying with her head on the other’s chest. They’re so beautiful I want to paint them. Of course I have no painting supplies with me and I also can’t paint to save my life. So I try to photograph them with my eyes, each time I blink I imagine I’m taking a Polaroid. I just want, I just need, to remember all the details of this sweet sweet tableau.
I spy with my little eye:
Two teens, each wearing a black mask. They’re walking hand in hand until the shaved head kid takes the bleached blonde kid into their arms. They pull down their masks and kiss.
Wow. It’s a kiss for the poets.
But, I also remember this kiss. Though this kiss belongs to these two cuties, it’s also our kiss. Like the Universal Kiss of Our Youth. My body is flooded with feeling, my body, heart and psyche still remember this kiss.
Loneliness – or is it longing? – washes over me making it hard to breathe. I take a sip of water and shed a few tears. The tears feel good and necessary, like when you see a Monet painting in person for the first time.
In my own marriage it’s as if two people are living together, but apart. “Together But Apart.” It could be a book title or the name of a new Netflix series. We don’t really kiss anymore. Or do we? Do we kiss and I just don’t notice? Are the kisses like a beige room that have no impact?
Now I’m angry. I want to kiss, I deserve to kiss. What’s happening to my life? What have I allowed to happen to my life, to me? Because the thing is, when your body, psyche and heart remember what it feels like to kiss like the two masked teens, then the grief you experience when you no longer kiss like that – the grief I’m experiencing right now in this park – the grief is intense. What the hell is wrong with God? What kind of a fucking sadist would make us remember?
Yet…
I spy with my little eye:
Joy. There is still joy, despite God being a sadist. Because these precious young people are growing up in such crazy times and yet here they are still having crushes, still making out, still having googley eyes for each other. They are everything that is right in this world and I love them for it. And I want to sit in this park forever and soak up their rainbow-hued energy.
Photo Source: Pinterest, Sydney Jade
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