The first time G visited my apartment, it was snowing. We had come in off the street, pink-cheeked and frosted and slightly giddy. As we shed our layers and shook off the ice, he chuckled, pointing at my gallery wall. The kiss, he said, I have the same one in my room. It’s the only art in the place. 

I looked to him and then to the wall, feeling the angle of our shared gaze align and cast itself over the painting. That’s funny, I said, maybe it’s a sign. I watched as the corner of his mouth twitched into a smirk.

Maybe. 

I didn’t tell him that the same painting had hung over my parent’s bed for most of my adolescence. That I would look up at it as I lay between them, on lazy mornings or overstretched evenings, inspecting the shapes with vague curiosity. Daffodils and pink lips and the comfort of a nondescript embrace. I traced the curve of an elbow, found constellations in the geometric shading.

As it turned out, G would return to my apartment many times. He would sit at the corner of the couch, just beneath the painting, in what would quickly become his spot. We’d chat and argue and digress and make out for long hours at a time as evening curdled into night and infatuation unfurled into something else. 

On cold couch-bound mornings together, the steam from our bad black coffee curled about the base of the painting, obscuring its title and softening the edges of its golden frame. When we were a wine bottle deep into Friday nights with nowhere to be, the shapes of the painting’s background blurred into swaths of watercolor; yellow and auburn and flickering black shadows; the Arizona landscape through a car window; my brother in the seat beside me; the heat of the earth rising in waves like paint tossed against the grain of gravity. 

It became G and me; the two of us. We talked about life, history, and the world beyond. We laughed about nothing and thought too deeply about everything. We stumbled upon and evaded conversations about the future like fishbones in store bought salmon. 

On certain days when the air was soft with possibility, he talked about his parents. He wove their story in patches over the holes in his own history as the faces of Klimt’s painting loomed above, a shadow of the tenderness that creates all life. 

To be born of love and into a world of hate. The facade crumbles. The painting devolves into shapes and colors and unformed metaphors. 

Once, as I awoke from a Sunday afternoon nap in the roundness of his embrace, I thought perhaps I finally understood. The air above us was lukewarm and heavy as water. Outside, the sounds of the city arranged themselves into miniature symphonies. As I looked down at the shapes of our bodies folded against one another– at the way the quilt rippled in small arcs like the curve of a flower petal– I felt I’d finally emerged into Klimt’s world. 

In this place, colors tossed themselves gleefully across my vision. They scattered like leaves on the wind, collected in pools of affection. Here, the gentle arc of his eyelid, there, the sharp corner of his elbow; bent; fork in hand; pasta bowl. Everything was sunflowers on the kitchen counter, burnt yellow bursting against the tile. A pitcher from Rome that became– is now– will remain– a vase. 

How to contain those we love in the material? Tempera. Acrylic. Porcelain. Canvas. 

When I looked at G’s face in this new world, I found the answers to questions I didn’t know I had. I forgot to ascribe undue meanings; to question the saturation of yellow in a photograph, to overthink syntax and commas, and whether or not the energy of a particular phrase necessitated its unpunctuated continuation.

Amidst this bliss, I looked at the Klimt only vaguely, in passing moments and fleeting glances. 

When, exactly, the painting changed for me, I cannot say. Perhaps it wasn’t a specific moment. Perhaps it happened slowly, imperceptibly, like the wearing away of a cliff. A rock trickles downwards–the color of the flowers dim. The red of the woman’s cheek becomes a worried flush. Her placid expression belies apathy rather than affection. 

I did not realize for a long time that the very makeup of Klimt’s figures is inherently incongruous. Despite their embrace, they remain unflinchingly distinct. Their points of contact quiver with incompatibility. He is of lines; she, curves. She bends to his predilections; makes space for the autonomy he asserts in outlined, opaque black. In grids of ungraciousness.

He bends only for the sake of his own breath. 

Then again, perhaps it is the figures’ incongruousness that makes the painting beautiful. The viewer's eye is cast across the frame at acute angles of interest; it bounds forth from the corner of the man’s rectangles and slides swiftly along the woman’s curves. The proximity of their differences is thrilling; one wonders at the textures of their skin- how it feels when their antithetical makeups press against one another. 

Like G and me, Klimt’s figures could never really be one. They pull at the twine of each other’s fabric; weave a new pattern out of distinct halves. They complement rather than complete.  

I learn to see that there is beauty in tension, in the push and pull of distinct elements. Differences are not, inherently, incompatibilities. They are assertions of individual selves; of characters that meet, somewhere, in the imperceptible middle between their disparate selves.  

In G’s new apartment, there is no Klimt painting. In his bedroom, the walls are filled with a variety of black--and–white prints in high contrast frames. Yet, when I awake there in his embrace, I look at their shapes staggering up towards the ceiling and I still manage to find The Kiss. There is Klimt’s man; his world characterized by and framed in cubes of monochromaticity. I have lost myself amidst their patterning many times and undoubtedly, I will again. 

The truth is laid bare in the pigments of the past and brought to life in those of the present; in the warm auburn of G’s face, the deep black of his hair. They are more beautiful than Klimt could ever have known.