It's in his bloody kiss.

When I was 10 years old and in summer camp—a disastrous 2 months for so many reasons, one of which was a cold, swampy lake—my fellow campettes and I made the following song our summer anthem: ‘It’s In His Kiss.’ The song instructed us young and impressionable campers that if we wanted to know if a boy liked us, we’d find the answer in his kiss. If a relationship was going to last, it was in his kiss. If the sex was to be blow-your-mind awesome, it was decidedly to be foreseen in his kiss. (This last interpretation, perhaps, came a bit later in life.) Meanwhile, at the tender, undeveloped, still carrying baby fat age of 10, I had not even held a boy’s hand, let alone kissed one.

Well, today—many [many] kisses later—and I can vouch for the fact that there’s some truth to this old adage which we got to know through Cher's wailing version of the song. A kiss doesn’t indicate just levels of lust, but it can translate passion, it can show care, and it really, truly can express love. When a fellow kisses you, you can feel sparks fly or you can feel bombs drop.

All this is to say: I had the most amazing kiss. ever. last week. He is a man I met on match.com. And for every rule I ever thought I knew about online dating—that it wasn’t possible to have that chemistry, the kind you have when you meet someone in real life and discover for the first time that you don’t want to keep your hands off each other—I was wrong. I was so wrong. I was a blithering idiot and it was proven last Thursday night at a bar in Downtown where I kissed Ryan [whose last name I still do not know] and thought my head might explode from time standing still and life reaching levels of bliss which had never been dreamed possible.

I’m not saying I found love in Ryan’s kiss. I mean, we hardly know each other (which is not to say we didn’t get to ‘know’ each other a bit better later on in the evening. cause we did). But we found something that was so special in its pure, physical perfectness for each other—a matching kissing style, tempo, head tilt just so—that I would see him again 100 times over, just to remind myself that that kiss is out there somewhere.

Will this perfect kiss get in the way of other relationships I’m exploring now? Maybe. Okay, probably. But I want it again. At the risk of sabotaging my feelings for other partners who may be more suitable in every other way for me, I will seek out that kiss again and again and again til our lips fall off or one of us marries or state line divide us.

I don’t know what it is. But it’s in his bloody kiss. And I want it again.