During my first years in England, I didn’t understand the significance of the little x at the end of an email or message. I must have asked someone, a friend, or I must have figured it out on my own that an x was a kiss. Then I was very puzzled. Why were my colleagues sending me kisses? Was I meeting my friend for a drink after work or going on a date? Over time, it began to make more sense – the x was only really a kiss in context. It was a kiss depending on who sent it, and when. Otherwise it was affection, friendliness, and disguised aggression. I hate you and wish you dead but there is an x at the end of the message, so please think instead that I have your best interests at heart. Or, I’m really angry but I can’t admit to it, so I will put this cross here to distance myself from being cross. All the strange evasive particularities of Englishness were condensed into the usage of the letter x.
We are so porous to language, and I don’t know when I submitted to the erotics of the x, but it happened. It slipped into my messages. It made me hopeful. I learnt to distinguish the various accents of the x, its obscure conventions. More kisses – five, say, rather than one – were less likely to be passion, more an outpouring of affection, often between friends. There was something businesslike about two kisses; it was only the single x, or the x tripled, that suggested romance, or sex. I found my preferences too, I learnt that I liked the x to be small rather than large, especially if there were three.
Sometimes I will write an email or a message to a beloved childhood friend and end it with one x or many, and I will receive no kisses in return. In those moments I remember I have migrated. One day, I heard a piece of music and burst into tears, and all my anguish was about the letter x, and the English language, which felt to me so impoverished in its vocabulary of love; I felt like I was living a hopeless existence in a place where desire was consigned to the meanest mark on a page, one line crossing another – surely in such a place there could be no flourishing, only the crossing-out of desire, negation in the exact space where an avowal should have been.
But all language is impoverished. Like letters that arrive in the post from someone who is there, not here – letters on the page are a reminder of an absence. There is nothing behind them, no substance, except a kind of magic that can make it seem like the absence is a pleasure in itself. Maybe the erotic x is not a kiss. It is the mark of something that can’t be said, that words can’t reach, something that resists representation while simultaneously insisting on making itself felt. The x slips in, it slips away, it is the thing that even in being denied leaves a mark. If you take two of the letter I, and displace them from their axis, and then lay them over each other, you get an X, which marks the place where we are strange to ourselves, where we are taken by surprise, where unbeknownst to ourselves we were meant to arrive. In sex, as much as in a text, it is this most elusive x that is of the essence.
And perhaps because it is elusive in this way, the written x can also be felt as a location, like a mark on a map – for it is the sign of a point of contact. It looks like the shape of lips at the point of a kiss, which is the agreed-upon contact that it stands in for, and yet it stands for more than the kiss: it stands for the desire for something that is not necessarily a kiss, but which is still a point of touch, a touch which is more than a word, a touch which is a place or spot (‘x marks the spot’) where there is something more than words between people, or where something ought to be, or even where something was. And as on a map marked with an x, this x is the point where we are always going: it is the point of rendezvous, or the place where the treasure is hidden. And once found it may be transformed a final time, back into a kiss.
Image © Europeana
This essay is part of Mark Up, a series on Granta.com where writers share their thoughts on punctuation and grammar.
