Free The Kiss: A Memoir by Kathryn Harrison

myself if I haven’t perhaps made the whole thing up, an overwrought fantasy inspired by wanting too much to be admired and loved. “Come here, ” he says again.
    I stay where I am, on the floor at his feet, zipped into the bag, caught between fear and longing. “Please, ” he says. “I just want to hold you.
    Don’t you want me to? Think of how many years of each other’s company we’ve missed. I don’t want to miss any more, do you? ” I want to be held too much to stay away. But, once next to him, I fall asleep before his arms are around me. I sleep above the covers and in the sleeping bag, and in the morning, I rise and bathe before he’s awake. My father began to take photographs, he tells me, to compensate for what he describes as his lack of imagination. He always travels with a camera because without its help he can’t visually recall where he’s been.
    He says he can’t picture things in his head, that he thinks only in words, a text unrelieved by any sensual memory. Trying to understand what he means, I remember looking something up in the Encyclopedia Britannica and noticing how claustrophobic its dry pages were, many crammed only with black letters, no images, the narrowness of the margins discouraging a reader’s drifting off into mental pictures. Can it be true that this is what it’s like inside my father’s head? An endless march of articulation? Not a face or a flower or a room he once slept in, not the smell of sweat or of rain, not the taste of an orange, of wine, of blood only words and more words? Between the university and my mother’s house are countless scenic stops, lookout points, chasms, rock formations, gulches carved by rivers, gnarled, ancient roots holding tight to big rocks, cliffs above distant roiling water We take our time as we explore each one, setting a pattern we’ll follow for the next few years, my father and I by the side of a road, looking, ostensibly, at some sight worth the drive, but in truth wholly absorbed with each other. “Sit here, ” he says, posing me on a rock. “Do you want me to smile? ” I ask. He looks up from the camera in his hands. “I just want you to be yourself, ” he says. I say nothing, and he reaches forward, touches my cheek. “Do you know who you are? ” he asks. “How can you, when you’re only twenty? ” He stands back and puts the camera before his eyes. “I’ll have to show you who you are, ” he says. “I’ll have to do it with this. ” The shutter clicks, and clicks. My father takes hundreds of photographs of me.
    He has to have them, he says, because when I am not before his eyes, it’s as if I don’t exist. He can’t summon my face. From a mother who won’t see me to a father who tells me I am there only when he does see me, perhaps, unconsciously, I consider this an existential promotion. I must, for already I feel that my life depends on my father’s seeing me.
    I was eleven years old when my grandmother’s Persian cat had a litter of kittens. There were five of them, all female, white, perfect.
    She promised one of them to me, whichever one I wanted. “But don’t touch them, ” she said. “Wait until they’re older. Until their eyes open. “
    Each day I knelt beside the box where they lay with their mother.
    I picked them up one at a time, cupped each body like milk in my hands and held it so close that I smelled its sweet breath, felt its heart beating under my lips. Eyes sealed, its head bobbed in confusion, bumped my cheek, my chin. It was one day after school that I did it. I didn’t know why, I knew only that I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t bear to see their always sleeping faces, their tiny eyes that never woke to me.
    For a week, longer, I’d held their beating, blind life in my hands, and I’d felt my heart squeezed in my chest. I’d felt as if I were dying. I laid one in my lap and, with one thumb on the upper lid, the other on the lower, I carefully pulled its eyes open,