Grief Sex
Adventures in intimacy prompted by my best friend’s death
Our first kiss was the night we met. We were in a barely lit ping-pong-slash-jazz-bar in the Village. I had watched The Piano Man perform at a venue down the street just hours before, and early on in the evening, I declared to our mutual friends, “I’m going to kiss him tonight.” It was an exciting kiss. A determined kiss. A kiss that felt promising. A moving-too-fast kiss, which is always the best kind of kiss.
Our last kiss was a few months later. It was a drunk, angry, middle-of-the-night kiss on a beach somewhere in Florida. A desperate, midargument kiss that came either before or after The Piano Man yelled, “This isn’t a movie, Julia!” but I can’t remember exactly when. I was grabbing at the sand as if trying to rip it apart—a deeply unsatisfying thing to do when you’re drunk and angry on the beach—and I couldn’t help but feel this was exactly like a scene from a movie. That scene where the two love interests yell hurtful things at each other, but the next morning, they realize they only said all those awful things because they’re afraid of how deeply they love each other. They know this is a love worth fighting for, and then they live happily ever after.
All that was left was to just not know each other anymore.
