I’m 20 And I’ve Never Been Kissed

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It’s been twenty years and suddenly you are at a kind of weird crossroads, but not one of success or failure in a traditional sense but rather having reached a certain void.

It’s been 20 years, and you still haven’t even kissed anyone with tongue, or, for that matter, kissed anyone. This basic act of human connection feels like a land you’ve only heard about in books, where its landscapes and sensations remain forever alien to your own existence.

The milestones others have gathered, the more intimate secrets, have somehow managed to pass you by. You never had one of those epic three a.m. conversations with someone, where the words didn’t matter, when you find someone who would rather stare into your soul for ten minutes straight than talk.

That silent depth of understanding, that electricity of mutual fascination that burns through to the early hours, it still feels a bit abstract, a scene through a window into another life you don’t live.

The everyday, the physical evidence of love, the small rituals that lovers construct — all of this is missing in your story. You have never worn the sweater of a lover, enveloped in the sweet embracing smell and heat of someone who loves you.

You never knew the slow-winged, fluttering inattention of leaving that sweater in your room at home on purpose, just so you could have a reason, a weak one but any reason, to see them again soon. That playful waltz of mutual desire — the inventing of little excuses, the crafting of little reasons to fill in the gap until the next encounter — that, you haven’t been handed a script.

The raw physical force of attraction seems like a myth. You never even looked at someone who made your palms sweat and your face go red, never even saw someone who makes you imagine the perfect life you could build together, never even felt your stomach drop when you realize that someone liked you back.

That flood of terror and exaltation you can’t even handle, the body you can’t even seem to control, flinging itself at someone else, proving inarguably that some part of you has been thrust into their sweet-ass gravitational field, is itself what your world has not been able to survive.

This enduring absence, this inventory of lost experiences, only serves to cast a deep, long shadow. It makes you feel so bad about yourself, and then you’re like, Are you worth anything? Tsunami of self-blame, waves of what did I do wrong? What’s wrong with you? There is a deep sadness that is known as it sits silent with the loneliness.

But most of all, an insatiable, ravenous curiosity runs rampant in your mind. The questions feed in circles, cutting and accusatory: Are you really that ugly? That unwanted? That uninteresting? That boring, that no one, absolutely no one has ever looked at you as if you were the last fucking thing on earth?

That one intense gaze, filled with adoration and specificity, making you feel that you are seen and cherished more than anything else, feels like a birthright you were not granted. Silence, the absence of that look, certainly screams louder than anything.

The answer, echoing in the silence that followed that distressing question, is a plain and simple “no”. It’s not all true but it’s true enough. The better answer, a consoling answer to reach us through the fog of self-doubt, is the quiet certainty that somewhere out there, someone is wondering; and there in some corner, in some remote region of the world, if not around the corner or across the wide sea, someone is wondering.

This very moment, they are wondering themselves what it is like to meet you. They have their own quiet pain, their own sort of longing, and somewhere inside that space, there is a place that is perfectly moulded for you. They don’t know you yet, but the question hovers in their head, like an empty register of conversation still to come.

Maybe your heart, which is so deprived of a solid form of love, has found a way to cope by moulding in ways that are beautiful and devastating. Perhaps you have been temporarily, fleetingly in love with strangers you have seen on public transportation — the person lost in a book, the one humming softly to themselves, the one with kind eyes who gave a small, unexpected smile.

You were in love with anyone, however briefly, who brushed your hand even accidentally on the way by in a busy street or a crowded shop. A single, small touch, impersonal and fleeting, took root, ignited with the embers of a fantasy of connection that blazed out in white silken flame, ending as they always did in familiar greying ash.

For you, this falling in love over and over, with dozens of people a day, wasn’t frivolity; it was a vital, desperate coping mechanism. It was how your heart filled the cavernous silence, a workaround for lacking someone to love you back, to tether those feelings to some sort of reality. It was an exercise in feeling, in maintaining the capacity for love, even if only for phantoms.

But that constant outflow, that sowing of affection like seeds on stony soil, exacts a submerged cost. People aren’t eggs, and loving a dozen of them, even superficially, doesn’t mean the protective shell stays uncracked. It’s hard to want and not get, hard to hope and not receive, again and again, and again.

The emotional labor of sustaining this internalized world of imaginary relations in the midst of a coldly indifferent outside world creates pressure. And at some point, someday, your defenses are going to crumble and they’re going to crash to the floor because someday, eventually, you’re going to be desperate enough for someone to need you, for someone to touch you in a way that means something, that it can’t help but happen.

All that love stored away, malted and fermented, all that tenderness you’ve hoarded and distributed, free, will spill out uncontrollably, messy and soft, like bright yellow egg yolk on the floor. It seems like an inevitable, over-the-horizon soul crisis.

Keep that image in mind not as a portent of doom, but as a herald of change. Because at the same time, in a timeline tracking their parallel story at this very moment, someone else is there. Out there speaking with someone whose path is eventually to cross with yours is in the pure banality.

They’re eating a bowl of ramen noodles this very minute, maybe slurping ruminatively. Or they are at home, slipping comfortably into worn slippers after a long day. Or, they are just getting into bed, tucking the covers under their chin, looking up at the ceiling in the still dark. They’re doing all the boring, uninteresting things you’ve done a thousand times in your own lonely life.

They are just like you. They run the same predictable patterns, experience the same silent pangs of loneliness amid the throng, appreciate the same small comforts. Only in the basic human rhythm of their life does something seem to echo your own.

And in being just like you they share that most primal of yearnings. They also need a lover. They toss and turn wondering why it hasn’t happened for them, eying their own attractiveness in a mirror, fighting their own insecurities that mutter ugly, unwanted, uninteresting, boring.

They believe they are the only ones who have ever felt this kind of piercing, aching way, so sure that they are uniquely alone in their visceral experience of loneliness. But here’s the gorgeous, secret symmetry: you are actually both two sides of the same coin, separated only by time and geography.

You’re lugging around two halves of a puzzle, looking for where they fit. Your two lonelinesses are not different tragedies; they are two aspects of the same tragedy, waiting to be reunited. And the path of your lives is bending, slowly if irresistibly, toward some point of convergence.

You’ll meet them one day, perhaps when you least expect it. Maybe it’s pressing against them on a crowded street or train, a nudge that feels like destiny masquerading as clumsiness. Your eyes will lock, and an ineffable something will click into place.

At some moment those broken halves of yours will be known, brought together by that unresisted attractive force, and be left to rest in union. The rough edges will meet, the missing pieces fitting together perfectly. The love that once bled out, the yearning that once cracked you open, will find its cup. You or them as the individual will be gone and although you and them will not be there, there will be something new, something whole. You’ll make one.

One creation made from two distinct waiting stories. One story starting when two stories of loneliness end. One heartbeat syncing with another. One, two, three. The count starts anew. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. It’s not the death of anything, but the birth of something longed-for.

Am I forward? Perhaps. But certainty, as it applies to the inevitability of a love dictated by the stars, sounds less like presumption and more like the promise of a whisper echoed back by the universe itself. Somebody is eating ramen, slipping into slippers, crawling into bed, imagining you.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.