What Our Lips Remember

Your kitchen makes me think of God as you're kissing me inside of it. I feel it in the tissue of my breasts that a year and a half on estrogen way back when never quite made form. Our hair gets caught inside our lips and after a while I no longer can quite tell which strand’s mine and which strand’s yours. Tangled together like this I wonder, what are borders? I close my eyes as your hand makes waves out of my ears. The lightbulb flickers and I feel the memories come on. They’re pressing soft right through my skull like wafts of steam, they peer out from the wall of my slightly trembling chest, pull themselves between small tufts of armpit hair, emerge like dolphins rising in slow motion from the ditch behind my knees, the crease above my collarbone, the soft brown mole that I have always had just whacked upon the back of my right thigh. Most times, memories, they drift in and out like rays of sun through a car window driving down a winding road. You can feel the past you’ve lived but you can’t touch it, right? Well, not this time. Now, here, in your kitchen with your lips peeling spit out of my mouth so so slow I’m sure, these memories, they coalesce, form together, become physical, bodily, earthly, and then join us in this room. I'm 15 and I'm 27 and I'm 19 and I'm 24 and every moment of my life in which a person's wrapped their fingers around the back of my head and drawn me near in that particular way that feels like it is trans— windows neither of us quite knew were there suddenly opening up to let in light from angles we have not seen like this before— I almost feel as if every kiss I've ever had and every kiss the person I am kissing has ever had is held inside that thin gap of air that flutters in and out between our stitched together lips.

You, leaned up on the door of your bedroom with the radio on and your coats hung up on nails on the walls. Our pants around our ankles but all we really want to do is kiss.

You, against soft dirt. A blade of grass that's licked inside my hair as you touch your lips up on my nose.

You, with boulders in your arms that brush against my neck like how I imagine tarmac feels about each tyre rushing over it in spring.

You, on the staircase at that music venue that is usually a shipping yard. The air like cotton candy in our mouths. We're just good friends. You cannot imagine lying in bed all naked and sweat-stained with our limbs all crossed like I can but still you think I ought to know what it'd feel like to kiss the you I'll love in a thousand different ways over all these slowly fading years.

You, with a toothbrush in the side of your mouth and you're laughing so much that you accidentally spray toothpaste all over my face as we kiss. You try to apologise but you can't stop laughing as you do it and all of a sudden we're both on the bathroom floor, cackling.

You, without a single word. Eyes eyeing eyes— you kiss me.

Oh and, you. Right here now we’re kissing in your kitchen that somehow makes me think of God as the lightbulb carries on its stuttering. You are eating Weet-bix with oat milk at 6.30pm at night and there's a splash of milk that's dotted on your chin. Did I forget to say that earlier? Sorry, I just feel so much right now and I cannot hold it all together. Anyway, you’re holding me. You’re kissing me. I start crying. I don't know why. It’s okay, you say, smile loose and comfy on your face like how an old pair of boots looks around a pair of feet that cannot remember a time before they wore them. I get it. You rest the muscles in your jawline on my shoulder and as we watch the tree outside your window just barely dancing in the evening light I experience it again. Everyone that I have ever kissed over the last 4232 days is on your kitchen bench with us and so are all these people you once kissed in ways that made your heart grow legs and step out of your mouth. There are many humans here that you have never told me of but they have kind smiles and I can taste them in the memories on your lips. You wave to the quiet air around us and in those tiny particles the strangers that you once kissed, they nod their heads as they wave back at you. People are rolling cigarettes, reading tattered novels and drawing throwies in old notebooks. One is even singing, looking out the dust-stained window with us as they hum. You kiss me again and everything that we have ever felt with someone or something else converges like the marks of countless waves against one stretch of sand. I start crying again and this time so do you. We lay our heads back, close each lash against our lids, and wonder as the world falls in.

Rosie Shute is a trans-neurodivergent spoken word performer, creative event organiser, writer across many fluid forms, visual artist and creative writing honours student at the University of Melbourne reframing academia as the daily practice of thinking deeply about what it is to be alive with others in the world. They have work published or forthcoming throughout Australia and in England, Singapore and New Zealand, in Westerly, Artery Zine, Takahē, Trans Rag, Unusual Work, Roundtable Readings and much more. Also, they have stains on almost all their clothes.

Insta: @ilovepissinginpublic