I’ve established that I Dont Want A Boyfriend (and btw Sven is doing fine thank you) but what I would like to kiss, be kissed, and kiss again. I don’t even want sex, I’m going through a robot phase right now (in which I feel…well, like a robot, and robots don’t sex, unless it’s robot sex, which I guess is plugging one robot into another? Oh gosh, how explicit) but I could go for a good kiss. A GOOD kiss.

The type of kiss where you’ve been dying to kiss each other and you both know it but neither of you are sure of when, where, or how it will happen, only that it will happen, because it has to happen. Maybe you’ve met through a mutual friend and the three of you are hanging out and at some point the two of you lock eyes and think, “Yes.” (Isn’t yes the most wonderful word? I have a necklace that says Oui on it. It’s my favorite thing.) That tension becomes harder for you all to ignore, like Lady GaGa in her outlandish outfits sitting behind Beyonce at the VMA’s.

You flirt for him, telling jokes, and they all land. At one point he’s drinking water and you tell a joke and he laughs so hard he spits his water everywhere and you think, “Goddamn I’m good.” I don’t know if there’s anything more powerful than making a man laugh. And you’re doing this back and forth routine and you’re thinking, God when is our friend going to leave us alone together? But you don’t know each other well so you’re not even ready to be alone together but you know that you want to be eventually. You part ways, for now.

Finally one of you caves, inviting the other one over to “hang out” or get dinner, or whatever. You both focus on your menus, or the book titles of the bookstore where you meet, or anything printed in front of you, because you need to keep your eyes busy so you don’t lock them on the other person the entire time. “We are living in a society,” said George Costanza. We can’t just kiss people we just meet, or can we? No, we can’t. Have some decorum.

But then the moment happens, and it always feels like it finally happens, like it’s been dragged out for hours, like a Robert Altman film. Like one of the lesser known Robert Altman films, or maybe Gosford Park. Ugh. One of you makes the move, maybe it’s silent, maybe it’s sudden, maybe it’s clumsy, maybe one of you even says, “Come here” before you do it, just to be safe, and then you kiss and it’s that perfect kiss where you can feel the intensity of the other person without feeling their entire tongue. It’s the kind of kiss that is so perfect that all you want to do is keep kissing, because what could be even better than that?

That’s what I want.

I Melt With You — Modern English