Twice

In my entire life, tears of joy have only streamed down my face on two occasions: when I first kissed you, and when I last kissed you. Anyone that knows me can tell you: I’m not a crier. I sat through Marley and Me—twice, might I add, because you wanted to see it in the theaters again—and I didn’t tear up once. You, on the other hand, had your face buried into my shoulder, bawling your beautiful blue eyes out. I pulled your face up to mine as the credits rolled through and I kissed your tear-soaked lips. Goddamn, did you wail at that movie. I kissed you then.

I kissed you on millions of occasions. When you first woke up the morning after you volunteered to be a guinea pig at the local cosmetology school in hopes of getting free beauty treatments, I kissed you. I kissed you even though you woke with a start and suddenly began crying when you realized that it wasn’t a dream, and your hair really was pink. I kissed you in the weeks following when you had to wear my old baseball cap, and you cried because you swore up and down that hats didn’t look good on you. I kissed you because I thought they did. I kissed you when the dog you had since you were in high school had to be put down due to a tumor in his lung. I kissed you when your first student loan bill came in the mail and it was way more than you had ever anticipated.

It seemed like every time you cried, I kissed you. And every time I kissed you, you cried. Your eyes were never dry around me. Even when you were laughing, you were laughing so hard that you started crying. To this day, I swear your eyes were the ones that caused such catastrophic floods.

And yet, looking back, I can’t help but feel grateful for your crying. Your emotions kept me grounded. Your fragility kept me from being my father. Your tears kept me feeling loved.

Which I suppose is why I cried when I first kissed you. I felt loved, something I had never experienced. Tears streamed uncontrollably down my face in the moment that I realized you were the girl for me.

In my life, I have cried tears of joy twice. And in my life, I have let my guard down for two people. When I let you in, it was a conscious decision. When my lips met yours that first time in the park, after we had been seeing each other for a few weeks with nothing more than a platonic hug, I knew I had to let you in. I had to let this amazing person fix my broken heart.

Several years later, that second person came into my life. I couldn’t trust this person; I just knew I couldn’t. When the doctors told me you were fading, I wasn’t even sure that I could meet this person. I couldn’t stomach the thought that someone you loved so much, someone that didn’t even exist in my reality yet, was taking your life. And yet, when she arrived, I couldn’t help but trust her. Even though she was taking you from me, I trusted her with my life. She was going to have to pick up the pieces of my heart that she unknowingly broke in that hospital room the night she was born.

She was so beautiful, so tragically beautiful. The tears that streamed down my face that night were the ones I was so unfamiliar with. As I kissed your cold lips one last time, I couldn’t help but feel joy amidst all of the sorrow.