We kiss

...like children, dry lips, softly.

I sense you next to me in the cinema, we are in the back row, nobody can see us, it is in the daytime but we've sought out the dark. Dust dances in the flickering light just above our heads, suspended in an imaginary road leading somewhere, anywhere.

You are holding my right hand in yours, you look at me and smile, and this is when I kiss you.

I wasn't planning to, not now, but maybe all along, all these years that we have known each other.

I steal that kiss, just as this time is stolen, and we are sitting in the back so that nobody will spot us, we both know this, though neither of us has said so.

We think the same and say it, all the time. But this time, neither of us does. Some things don't bear being reminded about.

And this is why our first kiss is one between two children, because that is what I remember, you as a child, though of course we thought we were adults back then, and we kissed like adults, greedily, blindly.

As you kiss me back, the memory is buried at the back of my dirty laundry, so many garments waiting to be washed, maybe tomorrow, next week, just not right now.

But I find you, the taste of you in my mouth has been somewhere all along, and I am thinking, I could get used to you again.

Sometime soon, the lights will come on and we will go on as if nothing has happened. But I know you are looking at me when you think nobody can see it.