There is no such thing as silence. Turn off everything in your house, sit there alone and you can still hear the wind outside and the buzz of electricity haunting your walls. Put a pillow over your head and you hear your blood thrumming in your ears. No fairy tale villain could ever command silence, no matter how hard they stomped down their cane or cut their fingers through the air bindingly as if to underline the word. Silence!

And forget about the wilderness. Sound is never more alive than in seclusion. Be alone long enough, try it! and the sound of your own breath will be like ocean waves crashing on the beach and your thoughts will become a clamoring restaurant with forks scraping plates and conversations all trying to out shriek one another.

No, that’s a lie. And I take it all back. Silence is real, but only exceptionally. It happens when you’re not noticing, so that the return from it back into sound apprises you that a heartbeat ago, you forgot to pay attention.

Usually, a hush is the most you can hope for and I am far from it. Specialty food stores were developed to bring exotic ingredients to your everyday meals, to elevate your mashed potatoes with truffle oil or your organically fed pork tenderloin with leaks and saffron. As I continued to glance among the culinary outlandish, choosing was becoming increasingly impossible. A simple task of finding something to make for my recently diagnosed neighbor left me an hour in with nothing in my basket but a half pound of seafood salad and water crackers for myself. But my family recipe of  perfectly warmed lean cuisines seem lacking when something like illness is involved. Between my debating mind and the lady in her black tweed coat who is on her bluetooth so it looks like she’s talking to the sun dried tomatoes, I am certain that quiet lives no where near aisle four.

Should I redirect toward the olives? The international cheeses? What would Black Tweed buy, I wonder. She seems to know what she is looking for. Somehow the olive oils seem more decipherable. I think to myself, what process makes olive oil more virginal? Something to do with pressing?

It had been nineteen years since I’d heard the deep voice, and still I knew whose it belonged to at once. “It’s you,” he said. The sound made my lungs expand without air. I took my time turning to see him.

“Hi,” I said to Runner Kane.

As far as first kisses were concerned, mine was innocent enough but pressed enough oils from my skin to make me shine just from the memory of it like a well used iron skillet.

Runner Kane was always a different kind of perfect. Beautiful and cut sharp on every angle, irresistible. There’s always a house in a nice neighborhood that’s trying to create a new level of perfection with diagonal lines in the daily cut grass or identically shingling their dog house. But there is also a house that seems more vibrant, not based on their holiday banners or heavy garden barrels. Just eye catching in its structure, perfect as it is. That was Runner, the first boy to kiss me.

That anomalous house, the beautiful one, never appears to be realisitcally occupied. We all called him Runner Kane but his real name was Paul or something that didn’t fit him at all. Sounded like an attorney you might need if you didn’t pay your taxes. He was always tan on his forearms and neck and face no matter the season, probably because he never wore a jacket which was odd since I hardly ever saw him inside. Outside and always running; everyone understood it about him. I was no different in this.

So I knew he wasn’t interested in me. Not really. But there he was, sneaking into the dark squeaking summer grass in my backyard one night. I don’t even remember why I was alone out there. I do remember what he first said to me.
“Been looking for you.” He had something tucked in his pocket, white and delicate. And alive. “Shhh, come on,” he whispered to me.

“What is it?” I breathed.

He found a good spot and laid down in the moonlit grass, stretched out and tucked his fingers toward him, waiting for me to get near enough. Only after he was certain I was did he present the little kitten. So small, mewing and happy enough just to be near Runner’s warmth.

I knew he was there to kiss me. Knew like an open scratch must know that it will scab over and heal itself. I stretched out next to him on the grass and that surprised him. I thought that if I flirted more with my hair like my best friend Samantha did with Jacob Morrison then it would all just belong to someone else and not to me. I couldn’t be shy because I wanted that moment with him, even knowing that once he had had it, he would be running again. I hated what it was that would come next for him. Hated it and loved it at the same time, because whatever it was, we would have him in common.

Something about the improbability of it, the sheer surreal aspect of having Runner Kane there in my backyard where my Dad tossed the ball to our dog Brooks meant that it wasn’t like real life where moments are awkward and you say the wrong thing and stew over it for weeks. This wasn’t a reality that he or I would be talking about with anyone ever again. Maybe I felt more bold because I guessed he would forget it the next day.

He was looking at me play with the kitten. Easy enough, he must have thought. But I wasn’t the least bit interested in the squirmy cotton fluff he brought me. I remember smiling, it might have only been with one side of my mouth.

And then I lifted my face to his. He wasn’t expecting that either, me kissing him first. Nothing to coerce from me, my lips were willing. Someone finally searching for him. He laid his warm palm on the hallow of my throat and his fingers tapped lightly over my voice. He turned his head, investigated each lip. I was just as eager. I took what I wanted while I could, grazing my mouth over his closed eyes and tasting the taught section on his neck.

Then his mouth faded from my memory as the present shouted a sale on pine nuts blared over the grocery speaker and the moonlight of my backyard brightened into the florescent lighting of aisle four.

He wasn’t looking away, or being bashful. His feet were still on the ground, wide spread and planted in front of me. Not running. “It’s you,” he repeated. 

“Hey! Watch it!” the lady with the black tweed coat yelled from behind me. I had dropped the bottle of olive oil I was examining on the floor at my feet. The yellow liquid pool was expanding, looking like honey melting on a summer sidewalk.

I hadn’t even heard the glass from the bottle break.