Trinket

– It was a kiss that saved her life. She would have never imagined such a thing was possible. There are few who would admit to believing in such a thing occurring. But it did. It did save her life. And it was a kiss, in some way. This light we have to see by is always shifting, as is the slippery nature of names. Such that when she was given this kiss, she would not have identified it as such. But he did. When he placed it in her palm and gently bent her fingers over it. He looked into her eyes, into the refracted light which sprung from them, highlighting their hue and said nothing more, “a kiss.” She did not immediately open her hand, but tightened her fingers around the object, feeling its texture, its shape. Her eyes fell onto the balled up fist and she was tempted to loosen her grasp, but was able to resist and her eyes rose to meet his. He was still caught in a moment of amazement, as if he had come upon something rare in his world, an act, an occurrence, a gift which was mutual. Her acceptance of all he had to give. She broke into a smile and offered it up to him. The contours of his face alighted a bit and his smile became more pronounced. He imagined she understood, wanted her to understand. In her own way, she did, which is to say, not quite. She never saw him again, but held onto the kiss he had given her nonetheless. She wore it round her neck on a thin golden rope chain. When anyone asked, she would simply tell them it had been a gift from a friend she had once had, though she would not tell the story of what he had called it, or of what she had, at first, perceived it to be. To her, it had simply become a “kiss” from some other part of the world of understanding, from a completely different vantage point to the one she had become so familiar with in the years since it was given her. And it meant something completely different from all of the kisses she had been exposed to in her lifetime since; from the kisses she had forced herself to share during games of spin the bottle, from the awkward kisses on dates-when there was lingering and she felt herself having to oblige the schema of things, from kisses pushed on her by drunken college boys, from the kiss she had given the boy she really liked but who didn’t seem to share in the emotion. None of these had asked about the necklace around her neck, or what hung off of it. After each, she couldn’t help but think about the boy who’d given it to her, about that moment, and wonder if perhaps he had had an insight she was still missing. For all of their attempts and her own, none of those failed, awkward, or drunken kisses had ever been more than the ephemeral moment of two bodies bumping into each other, in the slightest. She could scarcely recall shapes, colors, or articles of clothing worn. She could relive the feeling of rejection by the boy who did not return, even the slightest, of affection, but that was all. When she closed her eyes at night to search for her dreams, she would often find them flittering about, in the same way the boy had so long ago. In a half-conscious, still sleeping manner, her hand would reach out to her neck and wrap itself around the hanging trinket, off of the golden necklace. She would feel the warmth that a kiss brings, in her dream, as well as the physical mechanism of her heart. Had it not been for these moments which stopped her heart from shivering and filled her dreams with hope, her heart would have frozen to a stillness, and would have become unfamiliar with those things which are only possible within the warmth of a believing heart. It would be years beyond these moments when such possibility would finally manifest, but without those moments, the necessary conditions for it to do so would have long since dissipated. It is, after all, the manifesting of possibility, which in the end saves our lives.