The first time anyone without your blood flowing through their veins kisses you, you’re seventeen.
It’s a hug, a quick peck on the forehead – there is nothing romantic about it.
The only time you kiss anyone back, it’s exactly a year later, same person, the same action reversed.
It means goodbye, means I’ve missed you; I’ll miss you – there is nothing romantic about it.
(These actions, both of them, happen under dimly lit streetlights early in the night, promises best kept.)
Growing up, your grandfather, on holiday visits, peppers your face with kisses. His whiskers scratch your skin, and you laugh, pull away because you’re ticklish. Your parents infrequently bestow side kisses to your cheek; your grandmother does the same. Your other relatives hug you when they see you, and you take it with the good grace you’ve been taught.
You grow up in a country where you have two parents, and a chasm of cultural differences.
There is an unspoken rule: you do not touch people in public, do not kiss or hold hands – it is shameful.
There is an unspoken rule: hugs are for children, the youngest and most fragile – the strong stand alone.
There is an unspoken rule: friends are acquaintances, and family is blood.
(the word, I love you, here, is sacred. It’s for married couples, to say to each other out of view of public society. It’s for mothers to whisper down to their babies as they clutch them, still young enough to cradle. It’s reserved for pages in books of sappy romantic novels; it is not for every day use.)
Visiting your extended family a continent away during breaks, you accept hugs out of instinct, common practice. Your parents, at home, give you good night rhymes and packed lunches; walks to the train station and lessons on how to ride a bike. They do not say we love you, we are proud of you; do not smother you with hugs or prevent you your independence – they do none of these things until you are older, until you live in a different country with less rigid societal expectations. (Dad helps you make swords out of paper and cardboard and mock fights with you during the day; Mom’ll come up to tuck you into bed, scold you for reading past lights out – it does not mean they love you any less.)
The first time anyone you aren’t related to hugs you, you must be 12. Maybe 13.
It’s sudden and unexpected, but you go to an international school, now, and so it keeps on happening.
By 16, you can be reasonably expected not to flinch away, but it’s a close thing, a learned thing.
Your friends keep on at it though, and you don’t hate the contact, just don’t much understand it --
It’s comfort, you learn, holding someone close. It’s comfort, this contact, something meant to steady you.
People around you let the words “I love you” fall from their lips, like they are not precious things, these casually tossed away pieces of emerald. ‘Love ya,’ they say, teasing and joking, so you bump shoulders and smile and never say the words back. (Here is the thing: you are 13 and smiling falsely, you have moved through three schools and eight living spaces, you lose friends as you move and know better than to ever think they will stay with you.)
But here you are, just shy of 17, your friend for the past three and a half years moving away:
You stutter over the words until you manage to say it, the phrase rolling out unevenly -- your friend rolls her eyes at you, but you follow with, I’ll miss you, say, keep in touch, mean all the words that come out.
Here you are, 17, realizing what good friends you have left, these friends you’ll be leaving behind.
So you say I love you and mean it, cling to them until you have to go – in another year, you will do the same, as they let you slot back into your place like the puzzle was never deconstructed at all. In another year, you will throw your arms around each of them, smile wide, that touch of desperation gone.
But there is a year, before that:
A desolate summer where you practice your German on unsuspecting grocery store cashiers, cry yourself to sleep at night when the gut-wrenching longing of homesickness feels too much, because you miss that country you used to call home, you miss your friends (and you’ve never had anyone to miss so terribly before.)
You have a pack of postcards, because your dad writes them, because you’ve collected them from art museums here and there, blank, waiting to be used. It is still summer, your friends are busy doing interesting things, too busy to check social media accounts, so you go old-fashioned and you write.
Hi, or Hello, you start every single one: how are you?
You use up all the space on the back til your handwriting is almost microscopic, talking about castles, skirting around your grocery store visits, mentioning grades and what classes do you think you’ll get next year?, talking up the Capri-Suns you won’t drink, but found in novelty at the supermarkets anyway.
Love you and miss you, you end them all, heartfelt.
These are your friends: they respond in kind, through letters and pop-up cards, water-colored self-fashioned postcards and long-winded texts. These are your friends, still: you do not lose them.
You hug people more easily now, more casually, if still rarely.
You have old friends, a dent in your post-card stash alongside new ones.
You say I love you, sometimes, to people when you mean it, when your heart feels so close to bursting –
You stay quiet, others, because that has meaning too.