Keep something soft near you

When two people kiss, they make one long, warm tube with buttholes on both ends. Unlike the hands or the arms, the tongue is an organ that goes its entire life without expecting to ever meet a peer. So, when it does meet a fellow equal, in that dark, moist cave that no one except the dentist enters, it moves with the hesitance and wonder of Marco Polo meeting the first Mongol at the gates of Shangdu.

Kissing is like leaning too far out a window to smell the air after it rains, like tipping your chair back just a little too much, that held breath, that little panic and pleasure all at once. Kissing is about time: how it stretches and wiggles, how it reverses object permanence so that the entire world disappears behind eyelids, how it makes the heart feel not louder but closer and bigger, as if it had climbed …