Lessons From the Kissing Booth

Brandon proposed--well, repeated, I guess--a reductive experiment that I've been mulling over tonight: picking out the five posts that define myself and this particular vanity project. I've been at this for years, and there are an awful lot of words here, but mostly it's all the same thing over and over again. So, ok. This I can do. In excerpt:

The little girl: "I stopped. How could I not? From across the street she had already broken my heart, standing there so perfect and alone on the sidewalk. When I asked what was wrong, she sniffed with all of the power of her little nose and told me she was cold."

The touch tunnel: "I worry over what we are ruining, whether things will ever grow back up in our footsteps, whether we leave poison behind. If I could I would build you a city from pirate's gold and cotton candy, keep you there safe and far away from anyone who might want to slide under you and take what doesn't belong to them. I want to put marks on our foreheads so that all who pass know that we breathe only metaphors, that our fingerprints might burst into flame, that we will give those who might trespass copies of T.S. Eliot poems and soft kisses."

The old man #4: I leaned sideways, resting my head on his shoulder. He smelled of old books and sweat, and I could feel the warmth of his shoulder through my hair. "I think that you are a very, very great man."

The perihelion: "I told the sun about laughing so hard I could see the tops of my cheeks, about a baby on an airplane that lurched into my arms when I said hello to it. I told it that there are always going to be things under the water that no one has ever seen before because nature always wins. I whispered a few not-out-loud things, my voice vibrating softly all along the string and into space."

Phobos and Mars: "Eventually some of everything has to meet, falling invisibly into and through each other's orbit, what was separate becoming altogether something else. In those moments, I think, the past becomes like the second when films falls off of the projector, burnt through by the light, everything suddenly white."