Poems and Other Shit

I Wish For A Kiss - Reflection

When I was fifteen, I closed my eyes and made a wish. I would be kissed before I was sixteen.

When I was sixteen, I sat at the table in front of my birthday cake, and thought, I'm sweet sixteen. This is the year I will have my first kiss. I was living a new life in a new state, new school, new friends. I blew out the candles, and made my wish.

By seventeen, I was disappointed, and filled with anticipation. Sixteen had been a brutal year of fad diets, excessive tears and deeply rooted depression. Seventeen would be better, happier, riveting. I had fallen for somebody, I was starting senior school, and life was just beginning. I don't remember if I had a cake that year, but I remember ringing the restaurant and cancelling my reservation, because nobody wanted to come to my party. I don't remember gifts, or birthday wishes from family, or happiness. I don't remember making my wish, but I didn't need to. My birthday wish had become a desire that I hoped for without end or beginning.

By eighteen, I was feeling dejected. Less than ten people came to my house party, and so we ended up sitting in the lounge room playing a dictionary word game, before they called it quits at 9 o'clock. I watched them pull out of the driveway and speed away, and I sighed. I was carrying too much weight. School was my only social outlet. Sometimes I cried myself to sleep. I had been gifted a car that birthday, and I played my music so loud I couldn't hear my own voice as I drove too fast. I still entertained my hope, and I had an almost boyfriend. Eighteen would improve. It would be a year of passion.

That year, I ended up losing four kilos before my first date. He was later my formal partner. We got ice cream, we went to waterfalls, we went shopping and to the movies – I loved his company, and he seemed to like mine. I tolerated his distance, how he kept other girls close, here with me one day, and gone the next. He would always come back. I was his mainstay, somebody who never changed, patient and intoxicated on him. He was so perfect, so funny and kind and beautiful. I turned down opportunities for him. I cried, and laughed, and cried, and laughed. I excelled at school, because apart from him, it was the only thing I had. My ATAR was high enough to let me do anything I wanted, and my university gifted me a scholarship worth more I thought I deserved. I lost some more weight, started running, started dreaming, started hoping. He was there the entire time, from sixteen to eighteen, and I was still waiting for him to kiss me.

By nineteen, I had cried my last. He gave me an apology on my birthday, and I accepted it without sorrow. I invited him in, to come and drink with us, but he turned me down and fled into the dark night. I didn't care. There was joking between my one friend and I, about hooking up with the men at the pub, but neither of us eventuated. She had a boyfriend, and I was shy. She left early, and I went home and sat on my bed and sighed. I was nineteen years old. I was healthier than I had been in years, gorging myself on fresh fruits and basking in the sunshine. I was slimmer than I had been in over three years, and I hadn't even been trying to lose weight. There was no room for sadness anymore, for my life was a whirlwind of lectures and assignments, reading and writing, and vivid, colourful dreaming. I was going to travel, see the world, to live. And he was going to remain behind, with his other girls and poor grades and faithful right hand.

I did not wish for my first kiss. I wished to be happy. And I had never been so happy as the moment when he turned and disappeared into the night, and I sat on my bed and fingered the airline tickets I had purchased just days before.