Every so often, I get into these phases where I'm consumed with thoughts of kissing. Not sex, because that's an obsession that just keeps on giving, but your basic sugar-coated mouth-to-mouth. I think it has something to do with my wallflower youth and skipping Makeout 101 to go right to the graduate work, or maybe it's a combination of cuddly Winter hibernation and the early promise of Spring and all its attendant Fever. The last time I had one of these phases of thought, it was followed by a flurried phase of activity, much of it really, delightfully wonderful.

There is something about kissing that is singularly delicious and dishearteningly underrated. It's treated too much like an appetizer, and surely, sometimes that's all it really is. But sometimes, a kiss is everything. There are kisses that promise and deliver, kisses that disappoint, and the sweet surprise of kisses you expected nothing from, or didn't expect at all, but turn out to be the kind that lift and stir you in ways you never could have foreseen and will dream of long after. When I think of kisses, these are the sort that linger in my mind, and when I think of love affairs, it's these same sort of unexpected romances that enduringly engage my interests, because they, too, are a sweet surprise.

But for now, I'll have to leave the action to my overactive imagination, until the earth is ready to thaw and bloom, and so am I.