Save all your kisses for me

Kisses are powerful symbols, more powerful actions. The signifier of the power of love, whether it be affection, friendship, eros or agape. From childhood we learn that they can wake sleeping princesses or turn frogs to princes. Allegories that a Freudian analyst might draw notwithstanding, the kiss is a potent figure within almost every story of human relationships: Judas' kiss in Gethsemane, "kiss me Hardy", a kiss before dying. When we each have our own first kisses, however good or bad they might have been, they contain a certain something - I remember my first kiss with each of the three people have ever been in love with, and each time was charged with a frisson that time may have exacerbated certainly, but the moment was there. It still is whenever I think about it.

"And that's the last time I'm going to kiss you when I use you." His lips have just left mine, from a delicate kiss, no more than a touch. I'm stunned, literally numb for a few seconds whilst I process this. My first thought is prostitutes don't kiss their clients and that contextualises it all for me instantly. This is how you separate sex from feeling, how you insert an imbalance of power. I want to kiss him, contrarily, and that is certainly what I desire in the those moments whilst I'm thinking. Then a certain calm comes over me, because this is another layer of submission I've been given, another push further down, a way in which I become more and more that object of desire rather than that person, that girlfriend, that lover.

The Photographer looks at me quizzically when I tell him I feel sad, but content. Which is true, after a fashion - just like absence makes the heart grow fonder, what I can't have becomes more prized. Wonderland logic: things taken away are things bestowed. I'll miss his kisses, of course, but I also appreciate what has happened, I am happy to make him happy, and if this is something that he wants, then I'm glad to be able to oblige. Desire represented by no kiss at all.