A Kiss is Just a Kiss... (As featured on the blog of Love, Lulu Mae)

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.” ~Ingrid Bergman.

Kisses. Pecks, French, on the cheek, with your grandma, closed-lipped, open-mouthed. Are any two kisses ever the same, even between the same kisser and kissee? And is there anything more lovely than a kiss? I still sign all of my letters with x’s and o’s, as taught by my Granny in 1993 when I was learning to write letters. Sometimes, for letters that need extra love, I even break out my favorite red lipstick (And I think we all know how I feel about red lipstick…) and actually leave kissy marks at the bottom of whatever correspondence I’m mailing, hopeless romantic that I am.

Kisses are delightful. Even goodbye kisses remind us of what there is to look forward to or to come home to. And when you have a romantic kissing dry spell, there’s always the kiss on the forehead from your best friend, the kiss on the cheek when you greet someone, a sneaky kiss when someone gets a wild hair to play Spin the Bottle on Easter (Please tell me that’s not just my crazy friends…).

And then, suddenly, a real kiss ends the time without. After months of pecks on the cheeks and kisses goodbye to Granny on the phone, in the middle of conversation about what you are working on or while rocking out on the dance floor to Katy Perry or over a Venti Pumpkin Spice Latte, someone leans in and really kisses you and there aren’t words for the melty-weak-in-the-knees-in-and-out-of-the-moment-breathless-tickly minute it happens; lips touching lips, the tickle of moustache underneath a nose, all caught up and spinny with what must be all the blood in your body rushing into your cheeks. And then there’s the second after, with breath caught up somewhere else and lovely haziness keeping the nervous chatter at bay. Delicious.

I believe in that second with every teeny tiny bit of my slightly too romantic heart.

But, even if that’s not the kind of kisses you are getting or giving, I implore you: don’t give up on kisses. Give more than it seems you should. Kiss babies, kiss strangers, kiss your mom. Blow a kiss to the waiter that brings your mimosas at your Sunday Brunch. A kiss is such a miniscule gesture, a captured and contained moment of love or romance or passion or ecstatic excitement, but for such a tiny time commitment, a kiss always means so much. So, dear reader, love and kisses to you for a wonderful weekend!