I Don’t Want to Admit This to You

By Annalise Grueter:

I’ve been lying about my first kiss for over half my life. The official narrative is the one that sounds good, interesting. Cinematic. How the got-hot-one-day older brother of a friend dropped me off for a babysitting job, was patient when I shyly ducked my head. How he put his strong hand under my jaw and looked at me with sweet cerulean eyes and put his lips on mine. How my sister-in-law saw from her living-room window and teased me about it. I spent hours in a daze. 

That story did actually happen. I couldn’t make up the way it unfolded, didn’t try to steer it, couldn’t have. I was seventeen. Life was happening to me. 

Later that night, he picked me up to drive me home. Sun-kissed skin and shaggy blond hair. So confident, so mature in the driver’s seat. I was full of winged creatures. Buzzing. Ravenous. Newly bold from that gentle contact in the early evening. 

But it wasn’t my first kiss. Even though I’ve spent over eighteen years pretending as much.

There’s this thing we all want but mostly avoid claiming we do: Approval. Acceptance. To be perceived (for starters) but moreso to be included. We don’t talk about the little and large self-revisions we perform toward that end. It’s rarely public conversation for a person to disclaim, “Yes, I adjusted this piece of my personality or moment of my life to make it more palatable.” 

Celebrities and politicians get caught sometimes. Then we call it a lie and scaffold it into a scandal. The audacity. The betrayal. To take an experience and turn up the saturation. Even though it’s fine to do exactly that with photos on Instagram. 

The rest of us are luckier, I guess. We crave the acceptance and social warmth but have no reason to worry about scrutiny. Most of us aren’t important enough for acquaintances to fact-check minute embellishments to tales. If they’re storytellers, maybe they’re worried about being found out, too. An existential question in the social-media age: is being uninteresting a fate worse than any?

I don't lie very often. Rarely, really. I tend to normally have a fault of being too honest, of sharing thoughts or events too candidly, with too little polish. That makes me feel squirmy, sneaky, that I've upheld this outlier misrepresentation for so long. 

My technical first kiss I don’t think I actually remember. Who does, really? Remember who they kissed or when on an elementary school playground. When kisses are quick, unsexual pecks of childish mouths because the square-faced little boy let you play with his share-and-tell toy and said something to make you giggle. Those aren’t the moments we assign value to later on. They’re not the touches we document as milestones, as initiations. So that’s not the first, a six-year-old girl in a pretty dress and the fair-haired boy on the playground. 

I’m fascinated by the ways we try to reach each other. How do we navigate a life in which we seek recognition mostly through protective mediums, art that induces us to feel and feel seen without requiring us to give in return our own vulnerability? I want to see the sitcom protagonist on their quest for love and fulfillment. I don’t want to tell you about my first dates beyond counting or my graduate degree that is going unused. 

But I can’t have a conversation with a TV. A novel is compelling; a novel is an entirely different energy exchange than sitting around a table with other humans, sharing embarrassing moments, and laughing because it’s okay. Because we’re together, grimacing and rolling eyes, passing around snacks and drinks and ideas without the need to editorialize. 

My first real kiss? It was mundane. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and I was afraid of getting left behind. We were in a parent’s borrowed minivan parked somewhere we figured we wouldn’t be seen. He was a friend to whom I wasn’t attracted. He had bad hair and a cherubic face, dirty sneakers and baggy shorts. He was “helping me” because I asked him. His tongue felt strange. 

Five or six weeks later, a friend’s older brother, my crush, came home and asked me out. July had been technical, boring, underwhelming. September was magical, glitter in my veins and fire in the space between my bones. September tasted of raspberries and longing and sweat and felt like silk and strength and wish fulfillment. 

A hot late-July afternoon. I was seventeen; it felt like cardboard imitation. 

A gold-hued September evening and indigo night. I was seventeen; it felt like sunrise and the tawny stomach warmth of a long run and the velvety elixir of Rhenish wine. 

I was seventeen; for having a first kiss so late, I wanted the story to be damn worth telling. Triumphant and sparkling instead of pragmatic and desperate.  

So ever since, I lie. 

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Annalise Grueter

Annalise Grueter is a freelance journalist and opinion writer whose work is regularly published in The Sopris Sun and Aspen Daily News. Her creative non-fiction has been published in Camas Magzine, Flapper Press, and Disco Kitchen Mag. Her first book, Colorado Alpine Trail Runs, was published by the Colorado Mountain Club Press and Mountaineers Books in June 2022. She currently lives in Colorado.