I remember our first kiss. Of course I do. I remember the place, the weather, what I was wearing. I remember wondering whether my breath was all right, which seems a rather unromantic concern now, considering everything that followed. I remember the peculiar sensation of something happening that I had already imagined so many times that, when it finally did, reality seemed almost late. There was something reassuring about how unsurprising it felt, as though my body had arrived at the moment several minutes before the rest of me.
What I cannot remember is our last kiss, and believe me, I have tried. I have gone through those final weeks with the diligence of a woman searching for a misplaced passport. I remember dinners, conversations and a particular Tuesday when you irritated me so profoundly that I considered sleeping in the spare room, although I cannot now remember what you had done. I remember the blue shirt you wore that evening, the one I always liked, and you standing in the kitchen looking for your keys while I told you they were exactly where you had left them, which was both unhelpful and, as it turned out, correct. I remember all these things with extraordinary clarity, but I cannot summon even the faintest impression of that last kiss.
Surely we kissed. People who love each other kiss. They do it absent-mindedly, while opening refrigerators and answering messages and wondering whether there is enough milk for the morning. They kiss with toothpaste still in their mouths, without interrupting their thoughts, sometimes simply because the other person happens to be standing there. Perhaps that is what happened to us. Perhaps you kissed my forehead while I was reading something entirely inconsequential, or I turned my face towards yours at the door. Perhaps we kissed in bed, already half asleep, our bodies performing one of those small rituals that intimacy makes so wonderfully ordinary. I might even have been thinking about the laundry, which would be a rather unfortunate thing to have occupied my mind during our final moment of romantic affection. Still, I have always maintained that socks have an uncanny ability to intrude upon the most important occasions.
For a while, this struck me as a terrible injustice. We remember beginnings because we know what they are. There is a certain ceremony to a first kiss, with its hesitation, its delicious awkwardness and that brief, absurd moment when two people must negotiate the geography of their own faces. We are attentive because we understand that something is beginning, even if we have no idea what it might become. We collect the details almost instinctively, storing them away for the future, when we might want to tell the story of how it all began.
Last kisses are different because almost nobody knows they are having one. There is no announcement, no small bell ringing in the distance, no kindly stranger leaning across the table to suggest that you pay attention because this particular moment will not come again. Instead, you are busy being alive. You are making tea, irritated about the electricity bill or wondering whether the chicken in the fridge is still edible. Somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary living, something happens for the very last time, and you carry on without the slightest suspicion that anything has changed.
I find this rather difficult to accept, although I am not entirely sure what I would have preferred. There are days when I think that, had I known, I would have kissed you properly. I would have put down whatever ridiculous thing I was holding, taken your face in my hands and noticed the precise warmth of your skin, the familiar shape of your mouth and the way you always seemed to smile a fraction before you kissed me. I would have made a memory of it, something I could take out years later and examine, like a photograph kept between the pages of a book. But I wonder whether knowing would have made the moment unbearable. There must be something dreadful about kissing someone while already mourning the fact that you will never kiss them again. Perhaps there was a kindness in our ignorance.
I have been thinking lately about all the other last things we never recognise. The last time your mother picks you up and carries you to bed, not knowing that tomorrow you will be just a little too big. The last afternoon spent with a childhood friend before your lives begin their quiet, irreversible journey in different directions. The last time you sit at a particular kitchen table, surrounded by people who have no idea that one day they will exist together only in memory. We seldom recognise these moments for what they are. We leave the house, finish the conversation, put down the telephone and assume, with the extraordinary confidence of people who have not yet been disappointed by time, that there will be another opportunity.
Perhaps this is necessary. Imagine the exhaustion of recognising every ending as it happens, of having to mourn a moment before you have even finished living it. We would become intolerable company, forever lingering in doorways and turning ordinary farewells into elaborate ceremonies. Nobody would ever get to work on time. There is something merciful about being allowed to live without knowing which parts of our lives we are experiencing for the last time.
I used to think that forgetting our last kiss meant I had somehow failed to love you properly. Surely, if it had mattered enough, I would have remembered. But memory is a strange and rather unreliable witness. It preserves the colour of a shirt and discards the tenderness of a mouth. It remembers an argument about keys but loses an entire goodbye. I have begun to suspect that memory has very little interest in what we consider important. It keeps what it pleases, rearranges the furniture when we are not looking and occasionally presents us with something so convincing that we forget to question whether it happened at all.
This troubles me more than I care to admit. I could invent our last kiss quite easily. I could place us in the kitchen, with the late afternoon sun falling across the counter. I could have you turn towards me, smiling that familiar smile, and I could make myself reach for you. I know enough about the way we loved each other to construct something entirely believable. With a little effort, I could even persuade myself that I remembered it. The mind is remarkably accommodating when the alternative is an empty space.
But I have become suspicious of beautiful endings, particularly the ones we manufacture after the fact. There is a temptation to tidy up the past, to arrange its untidy details into something that resembles a story with a beginning, a middle and a conclusion that makes sense. Real life, unfortunately, has never shown much interest in narrative structure. People leave in the middle of conversations. Relationships end without providing a satisfactory explanation. Sometimes the last thing you say to someone you love is a reminder to buy milk, and no amount of retrospective poetry can make it anything other than that.
I think what unsettles me most is the thought that somewhere in the past there is a version of myself who is kissing you for the last time. She has no idea what is coming. She is probably distracted, perhaps tired, perhaps still mildly annoyed about something you said earlier. She is thinking about tomorrow and the thousand small obligations that make up an ordinary life. She kisses you and carries on with her day, entirely unaware that I will spend so much time, years later, trying to recover those few unremarkable seconds.
I find myself strangely envious of her. Not because she still has you, although there was a time when that would have been reason enough, but because she possesses something I can no longer recover. She does not yet know that there will be a last kiss. She has no reason to question the ordinary certainty of another evening, another conversation, another moment when you will be standing close enough for her to reach for you without thinking.
For a long time, I wanted to remember our last kiss because I thought remembering would give me something back. Now I am beginning to understand that perhaps its very ordinariness was the thing worth keeping. Whatever happened, wherever we were, it belonged to two people who had not yet learned to think of themselves in the past tense. We were still living inside a future we assumed we would share, and neither of us had any reason to believe that something as ordinary as a kiss deserved our particular attention.
Perhaps that is why I cannot remember it. Perhaps neither of us thought to.
We still believed there would be another.
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