The First Kiss and the Words That Came Too Late

Do you remember your first love? The first kiss, after which the world around you seemed bigger than the sky. The first closeness, when the body seemed to have grown up all at once, while the soul still stood barefoot in the middle of the universe, not knowing what to do with its hands for sheer nerves. This memory is not about the body, but about how first feelings once seemed to us a whole world. Let me tell you about a lad named Tymko.

From the time he was small he loved a girl called Hanna. As children they herded geese together, shared a single pear, laughed by the old barn. Once they kissed so awkwardly that afterwards both of them stared at the ground for three days. For Tymko that kiss became a whole world. For Hanna it was just a warm childhood memory. They grew up. Hanna became someone else, a grown woman. And Tymko stayed on living in that summer where she still laughed only for him.

Tymko loved her quietly. He never spoke of it straight out. Instead he gave signs, which to him were as plain as the sun in the sky. He carried water for her old mother. He chopped firewood by their yard, though nobody had asked him. He mended the little gate that creaked in the wind. At the market he always bought the finest bublyk roll and slipped it onto her windowsill unnoticed. He brought her the sweetest pear from that very tree they had once sat under.

He mended the bench by the well where she liked to sit while she waited for water. And Hanna read all this in her own way. To her, Tymko was a good neighbor. Tymko is kind, she would tell her mother, Tymko will always help. She saw his care, but she did not see the thirst behind it. For kindness can be a sign of love, but without a word of confession it is often taken for plain kindness.

And then Ostap appeared in the village. A lad not so deep, not so silent. He did not carry a whole summer inside him. He simply walked up to Hanna by the church and said: Hanna, I like you. Come to the evening gathering on Sunday. And Hanna smiled. Tymko saw it from around the corner of the inn. It hurt him so much that his chest went cold. But in truth he was not jealous of Ostap.

He was jealous of a human voice - it had done in an instant what Tymko had not dared to do for years. He was jealous of the one who said aloud what he himself had buried ten times over. Paraska, who had seen all of it, came up to Tymko and said quietly: So what is she supposed to see, Tymko? The way you keep silent? Silence, son, does not always look like love. Often it just looks like silence.

You carried her water and hid your own thirst, Paraska added. So how was she to quench what you never showed her? A sign without a word is like a pie under a towel. You know it's there, but the guest thinks it's just a towel lying on the table. That was when Tymko understood for the first time: Hanna had taken nothing from him. She simply never knew that anything was being given to her as love. She had not refused him, because he had never asked.

For so many years he was afraid of hearing no that he stole from himself the chance of hearing yes. That evening he found in his own yard an old sprig of mint, the very one he had cut himself. He smiled - not from joy, but from quiet acceptance. First love does not always have to become the last. Sometimes it is simply the first to open a door in a person.

And then we spend the rest of our lives thinking we must go back to that door, instead of walking on. The heart is not a chest with a lid. If it has opened, at least let the other person know there is a light on inside. The tenderest sign without a word sometimes remains just a sprig of mint on someone else's windowsill.