January is Makeout Month at Autostraddle.com

It is nearly midnight on December 31, 2019, and you are drunk as fuck at a gay dance party in Silver Lake wearing a ten-dollar H&M jumpsuit, white Reeboks and lip gloss that makes your mouth feel like it was recently stung by a a dozen gentle bees. The building is sweating. You and your group of friends are regular attendees of this dance party, deeply familiar with the multi-level venue you’ve only ever seen blurry after dark — its coke-dusted photo booth, its filthy bathroom with an infinite line and no toilet paper, its two understaffed bars slinging $15 shots of tequila and usually, on nights like this one, a DJ committed to playing the hits. The real hits, the songs everyone actually wants to hear, you know the ones. I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Call Your Girlfriend. I Want You Back. Those hits.

“If we don’t have anybody to kiss at midnight, we should kiss each other,” you say to your best friend. You’re not sure where this idea came from but it feels very right and good. She agrees. You are on the same page.

It’s been a weird hard year and you’ve lost a lot this year including, at times, your sense of self and your sanity. You are rebuilding yourself into a better person, a person with a healthier relationship to work, a person with a work life balance, a person with a Strong Inner Core who doesn’t need Outside Affirmation.  These new friends, your group chat — the ones you are at the gay dance party with — are part of that rebuilding. For well over a decade you’ve generally made friends by leading with your work or some sort of creative collaboration, but these are friends you’ve made by leading with your personality, which was scary at first but feels less so every day.

You all have wild, outrageous amounts of reckless fun together, the kind of fun you’re having tonight. You laugh until your faces hurt. You blaze out into the evening with terrific nihilism. This nihilism and the binge drinking it engenders has an expiration date, but you don’t know that yet. You will never attend this dance party again but you don’t know that yet, either, don’t know what 2020 has in store for us all. For now you are living in the intoxicated  moment and this, too, you have charted as personal growth, an important embrace of “letting go.” These things take time, after all. (Maybe that’s the point of this story, is how difficult it is to know exactly how much time a thing will take.)

You think you love these friends that night but you have no idea how much deeper that love is going to grow when the world shuts down and you become each other’s family. You think you know each other now? You think you love each other now? You haven’t even scratched the surface.

And, of course, you love your best friend.

So at midnight, you kiss her. You do it. It happens, it’s midnight and you’re kissing and it’s really great? From that very first moment it feels like you’ve been kissing her all your life. You’d initially anticipated that the midnight kiss would last for 30 seconds, at most, if that. You would kiss and then you would laugh and everybody would laugh and it would be a funny story. But all the bees scatter and everything is buzzing and you’re kissing and kissing her feels like dancing to all the hits, except better because you are better at kissing than dancing. Sometimes it takes time, you know, there is a clash of different kissing styles, different go-tos for heads and hands and mouths and teeth and tongue and all of that but not with her, with her it just works, immediately.

You keep doing it — not for the danger or for the plot or for the possibility of ensuing chaos and the way chaos releases you from responsibility for yourself. You keep doing it because it is fun and exhilarating, actually. You could become addicted to this if you let yourself. You push her against a wall, and you yank her to your waist, and you smile and she smiles and it’s dark but your limbs are light. You feel weightless and made of stars. Her blue eyes sparkle with inevitability.

Only once before in your whole adult life have you dared to make out with someone with whom you were already very close, as friends — someone you love deeply and entirely, someone who knew you, really knew you, had seen you in all sorts of compromising situations and still wanted you, and what you learned from that moment and the moments and the relationship that came after is that sometimes when you break up with someone who was your friend before the relationship, you can’t just automatically go back to being friends like you were before. You are, at the time of this New Years kiss, still sorting through that specific situation, still trying to find a place with the ex where you can both feel safe and happy and the feelings you still have for each other won’t hurt so much anymore.

You can’t lose this girl, too, this best friend you are kissing at midnight. You can’t lose this new best friend who knows you, really knows you. So even though this make out has gone really well, really beat all expectations, you are very certain that it will not happen again.

It is now very late, maybe two in the morning, and you are tired, and probably sick because that’s what happens when you drink 12 shots of tequila in one night, and you say she should sleep over, but as friends, not “in a sexual way.” She could not agree more. You and your best friend are completely aligned on this point, that you will not be having sex, that you will be prioritizing the friendship.

And you tell everyone you see that night, including but not limited to all the friends you came with, another friend you run into, a stranger on the street, your dog and your Uber driver, that you are not going to have sex because you don’t want to ruin the friendship. This is personal growth!

You stick to it. You don’t make out more or have sex or anything like that. Not that night. Not for many many months afterwards.

Instead you go to sleep, together, as friends, and by the time you wake up she’s gone (but she has left a note because she always leaves the cutest notes), has made it home to Santa Monica, eaten a breakfast sandwich and laid back down in her own bed and has been participating in the group chat while you kept sleeping. You wake up to nearly 100 missed notifications, pictures of everybody’s hungover faces. The group chat is lit this morning. You’re recapping the year you all experienced together, like you are literally measuring your life in love on this cold January morning, sharing your archival photos and listing top moments. Already your makeout has become one of those moments, another shared anecdote.

You are a bit upset though because you, too, want a breakfast sandwich and Postmates says McDonalds is closed even though McDonalds is actually open and Door Dash knows that McDonalds is open but doesn’t know that they are serving all-day breakfast, and it is feeling increasingly unlikely that you will secure an Egg McMuffin this morning. But your hair still looks fantastic, somehow. Your shoes — not so much. Your white sneakers have somehow turned grey overnight. So your experience is similar in that way to what happened with Cinderella.

Once on a New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, draped in beads and drunk off Captain Morgans and Pepsi, you kissed a boy with bleached tips who said “you know we’re going to get married, right?” and you said “yes” in return and now you don’t even know where the fuck that man is, or what he’s doing, or who he married. Or if he still has his tongue pierced.

Making out can be so casual, can be a thing you do with a stranger at a party or in a basement, with a friend playing a game, with someone you’re not even sure you like, someone you used to love but don’t anymore. But it can also be a type of opening, a sweet surrender, a shared hunger, an immediate connection, a thing that turns something into something else.

It did seem, that night, like something had opened between you and your best friend but that you’d both decided to close it afterwards, for safekeeping. It seemed like that for a good long while. You won’t kiss again until a game of spin-the-bottle with your pandemic pod (listen it was a weird time), but once that seal has been ripped off, it does seem to keep happening.

An entire year and a half will pass between New Year’s Eve 2019 and the moment you and your best friend sit down together on your sofa in the middle of the day and talk about what is happening between you, how you seem to be making out relatively frequently these days, and if maybe it’s time to call it something besides a friendship, like a relationship. Maybe it’s worth the risk.

Maybe the girl you kissed on New Year’s Eve is like my boyfriend with the tongue ring, or any of the exes I kissed on New Year’s Eve but don’t kiss anymore, including the ones I really loved, including the ones I still do. But maybe you will eventually fall in love with the best friend you kissed on New Year’s Eve, with her funny faces and extended bits and her jokes and compassion and generosity and enthusiasm and patience, and maybe five years later, by New Year’s Eve 2024, she will be your wife.

You won’t be drunk this New Year’s Eve because you rarely drink these days and she’s been sober since 2021. You will still be close friends and forever family with almost everybody from the aforementioned group chat / pandemic pod. You will be marginally better at work/life balance. You will live in a house with your wife in which the Christmas Tree is still up but you all know it’s living on borrowed time. You will be in the middle of converting the house’s smallest room into a nursery for a baby because after years of both of you trying, your wife is pregnant and the baby is due in seven weeks.

Sometimes what begins in chaos ends in chaos and sometimes what begins in chaos leads, slowly but eventually, into something more beautiful and stable than you ever imagined possible. 

You can make out whenever you want, now. And it didn’t, after all, ruin the friendship.

January is Makeout Month on Autostraddle.com and you can look forward to more thematic content all month long.

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