FIRST KISS

 

The first day in your country, after I’d arrived from the summer-like weather of southern California, you showed me the hilltop monastery taken over

by the Nazis who ruined the spacious chapel filled with gleaming icons

of Christ and the saints into a horse stable of desecration; then after

the war a few years’ later the Soviets took their turn at rampage,

transformed it into a psychiatric hospital for dissidents and their political
re-calibration, their psycho-social castration, doing their best to scrub all remaining traces of god and human holiness from the stone walls.

A friendly Lithuanian nun gave us an informal tour, you thoughtfully translated her strange words as we walked among these stone-walled rooms coated with so much human joy and misery, solace and danger conjoined. Later, we ambled down the hill through stands of leafless birches and evergreens taking photos of each other in our heavy winter coats.

Afterwards we ate lunch in the cozy hotel near a lake where I joked about the old balding guy with a puny pony tail and his sour faced friend seated across from our table being Russian gangsters, they’d driven up to the place in an old gray Mercedes spewing smoke out the rear. You ordered a Chinese dish with fish and rice --I had a delicious pancake with flavorful mushrooms and gravy, a traditional meal you said.

After lunch we drove a few miles across the city to the special cemetery where your beloved uncle and grandmother are buried. You parked near the entrance and we sat silently still in your front seat on that cold day in November.

I was scared to tell you how much I’d wanted to kiss you in the hard wooden pews of the old church an hour or two before, but jet-lagged and lonely I gathered courage somehow and began to speak now about this desire to touch you, to begin to bridge this distance between us.

It didn’t go well for some minutes as you seemed startled, your blue

eyes receded further away and I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake
traveling all these hours and miles to meet after those long happy talks
on Skype.

You sat a little stunned, at the steering wheel as we watched people

with heavy coats, somber and silent, eyes on the ground, walk out
of the cemetery on that cold November day in ones and in twos. I don’t
know if I’d ever felt so alien, so strange, almost homeless there in the passenger seat of your car while my mind careened, imagining a trip
ended before it had begun.

How it then happened I still cannot exactly remember, but suddenly

out of this uncomfortable quiet your moist lips met mine and our eager

tongues found each other in an urgent hunger, strong and delicious, striking us

both like a pleasurable lightning bolt, and there parked in front of the Kaunas

cemetery on that gray day in late Autumn tucked into the front seat of your silver Volvo our lives began this lovely bewildering dance of two persons coming together at a shifting boundary of life and death, an illusory fence

really where headstones and crumbling monasteries stand rising

from a past of loss and pain and guide us like birch trees leafing
shyly in early Springtime on the Baltic into the mystery of what yet
we might become.