"The Kiss": A Review of a Novella from Real Stories
Genre: Documentary prose · Love story · A meeting that never fully happened
Tagline: "Sometimes a whole lifetime passes between two letters"
"The Kiss" is the quietest novella in the collection and the most brutal in its construction: almost the entire text rests on a single May evening, and it’s only in the final paragraphs that the reader learns this one evening will stretch into twenty years of waiting for a single letter.
The story, for readers new to it: he invites her over — to get acquainted, to talk, to have some wine; it’s raining, there’s only enough wine for two ordinary glasses instead of proper wine glasses, and a conversation that starts with a simple "so where are you from" drags on, unnoticed, until dawn — both of them end up sitting on the floor, forgetting they have work in the morning. A few days later she comes back, they barely talk, and she stays until morning. A few days after that, driving the same car she first arrived in, she gets into an accident — the phone shatters along with the car. He doesn’t know: he calls the next day, then every day, hears long rings, then a mechanical "the subscriber is temporarily unavailable," and then — the silence of a disconnected number. They have no mutual friends, no other way to reach each other, only the one number, now gone. She, on the other side of that silence, is certain he simply didn’t want anything more; life carries them both off to different cities, different jobs; she’s photographed for magazines, her name turns up in the papers, but that May evening, by her own admission, "sometimes felt like it had just happened." Twenty years later, searching by chance for a quote for a friend’s congratulations card, she stumbles across his photograph in an article — older now, greying, but with that same slightly crooked smile — and, without trying to find him on social media or through mutual friends, tracks down a work email address and writes a single line: "I found you by accident... for some reason there was only one thing I needed to know: are you still here?" The letter goes unanswered for months; she doesn’t delete it, keeps checking her inbox, sometimes more often, sometimes less, but can never quite forget it. Only on the last day of the following summer does a reply, with no subject line, appear in her inbox: "I got your letter the same day."
The device the whole novella turns on is a symmetry of rain: it opens with a May rain on the day they meet and closes with a warm, almost autumn rain on the day she finally opens his reply — and that same symmetry runs through the very structure of the waiting itself: the letter was received "the same day," meaning the twenty years of silence existed only on her side; on his, there was no delay at all, only a gap between sending and reading that neither of them could ever see.
Kadyrov deliberately cuts the novella off on that single line of reply, leaving what happens next unresolved: the title, "The Kiss," never once describes a literal event in the text — the only kiss here is metaphorical, the gesture that never happened, deferred, the one both of them, without ever agreeing to it, kept a two-lifetime silence for. The title works as a frame the reader is required to fill in, since the text itself never does.
Quote from the novella: "I found you by accident. It’s strange, writing to someone after so many years. But for some reason there was only one thing I needed to know: are you still here?"
#IskandarKadyrov #RealStories #TheKiss #Review #DocumentaryProse #LoveStory #LiteraryNavigator #18plus
Tagline: "Sometimes a whole lifetime passes between two letters"
"The Kiss" is the quietest novella in the collection and the most brutal in its construction: almost the entire text rests on a single May evening, and it’s only in the final paragraphs that the reader learns this one evening will stretch into twenty years of waiting for a single letter.
The story, for readers new to it: he invites her over — to get acquainted, to talk, to have some wine; it’s raining, there’s only enough wine for two ordinary glasses instead of proper wine glasses, and a conversation that starts with a simple "so where are you from" drags on, unnoticed, until dawn — both of them end up sitting on the floor, forgetting they have work in the morning. A few days later she comes back, they barely talk, and she stays until morning. A few days after that, driving the same car she first arrived in, she gets into an accident — the phone shatters along with the car. He doesn’t know: he calls the next day, then every day, hears long rings, then a mechanical "the subscriber is temporarily unavailable," and then — the silence of a disconnected number. They have no mutual friends, no other way to reach each other, only the one number, now gone. She, on the other side of that silence, is certain he simply didn’t want anything more; life carries them both off to different cities, different jobs; she’s photographed for magazines, her name turns up in the papers, but that May evening, by her own admission, "sometimes felt like it had just happened." Twenty years later, searching by chance for a quote for a friend’s congratulations card, she stumbles across his photograph in an article — older now, greying, but with that same slightly crooked smile — and, without trying to find him on social media or through mutual friends, tracks down a work email address and writes a single line: "I found you by accident... for some reason there was only one thing I needed to know: are you still here?" The letter goes unanswered for months; she doesn’t delete it, keeps checking her inbox, sometimes more often, sometimes less, but can never quite forget it. Only on the last day of the following summer does a reply, with no subject line, appear in her inbox: "I got your letter the same day."
The device the whole novella turns on is a symmetry of rain: it opens with a May rain on the day they meet and closes with a warm, almost autumn rain on the day she finally opens his reply — and that same symmetry runs through the very structure of the waiting itself: the letter was received "the same day," meaning the twenty years of silence existed only on her side; on his, there was no delay at all, only a gap between sending and reading that neither of them could ever see.
Kadyrov deliberately cuts the novella off on that single line of reply, leaving what happens next unresolved: the title, "The Kiss," never once describes a literal event in the text — the only kiss here is metaphorical, the gesture that never happened, deferred, the one both of them, without ever agreeing to it, kept a two-lifetime silence for. The title works as a frame the reader is required to fill in, since the text itself never does.
Quote from the novella: "I found you by accident. It’s strange, writing to someone after so many years. But for some reason there was only one thing I needed to know: are you still here?"
#IskandarKadyrov #RealStories #TheKiss #Review #DocumentaryProse #LoveStory #LiteraryNavigator #18plus
True, Unedited
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