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The Kiss
Your lungs are filling and your breaths come short. The family surrounds your bed. Some are crying. Others petulant, still others wait benignly for the end. Forget about them and their agendas. Forget, if you can, even about death. Why give it so much attention now? After all, you will soon be its lover for a very long time.
For now, consider the kiss. Not the one from the boy behind the schoolhouse in winter. He raised your skirt and placed his hand on your thigh. It was a new world for you both, and you let him put his rough, chubby lips to your own. So briefly, that when it was over neither of you knew what a kiss was, or could be, but nonetheless it was something you remembered until the soldier.
The man in uniform came to you, his boots shiny and smelling of fresh leather, his company on patrol in your village. It does not matter that you cannot remember which war, for there were so many wars. What matters is the young, lean soldier, how he pulled you to him and kissed you long and hard, like his body, how his hands wandered the map of your body, how he was gone so quickly. If he died in the next battle or lived to be an old man is not for you to know. What lasts is the memory of his hot breath on your pale soft skin.
It was that same hot breath that you recalled while lying in bed, faithful and dutiful, beneath the husband you felt nothing for, in a marriage arranged by elders. That hot breath kept you sane while you stared at your husband's still blue body, when his heart exploded at twenty-nine.
What matters now is the kiss from the male nurse who attends you, who comes to you and carries your waste away. In your fever, he has become a prince. He comes to save you, to deliver you from all memories. Savor his kiss in your delirium, while he watches the clock and counts the minutes until he can leave the hospital and go home to his own lover, a man not yet twenty.
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