Confessions of a Murder Suspect

CONFESSION

The kiss. Destroyed. Forever. Malcolm and Maud ruined it.

It was my first kiss. It was once the most precious moment in my life, an experience I could relive and savor and examine from new angles, like a piece of fine art. Now it was like a worthless forgery. I couldn’t see it in my mind’s eye, couldn’t feel it, couldn’t even truly remember it.

I only believe it actually happened—almost as if in another life—because I wrote it down. And honestly, friend? I wonder sometimes if I just made it up, like a silly little fairy tale hastily scrawled by a pathetic, caged child.

When I stopped sobbing, I pulled my diary from its hiding place under my bed and found the page where it is written. The book fell open to the page immediately, since I’ve reread the words so many times:

What I remember most is that the laws of physics no longer seemed to apply. Gravity was backward and the world was, I’m quite certain, moving in slow motion. His pull wasn’t a pull; I was just falling upward, and he caught me. There really was no beginning or end to the kiss; it wasn’t even really there—and because of that, it was tremendous. Our lips were just four sweet, shy people meeting, saying, “Hello, it’s nice to meet you.” But what passed between them was massive. Nuclear. And in an instant, every cobweb inside me was obliterated. My inner struggles, my uncertainty, my fear of tiger attack… gone. Just the feeling of being a newborn, a pure soul just waiting to be imprinted upon.

I slammed the book shut. Even after all this time, it reads as nonsense.