Ten Kisses by Arlene Tribbia

Desire & longing is the through line in a life.

Who was I reading Emerson’s essays in my twenties & then heading off hopeful to Hollywood from the Midwest to try & sell a television script that I wrote in college – about love no less.

What did I know about love then?

I know I still believed in happy endings despite all the dramas I witnessed:

my friends falling in & out of love with other giddy drunk strangers on the train ride home from work in downtown Chicago, flirting for lovers two seats over while I kept my eyes down reading my essays or sometimes stared into a dark night’s winter reflection on the windows & wondered about the oversoul, the weight of my brother’s lost soul. 

What was Emerson saying then about discipline & circles, how one should do this or that to tidy up the unkempt gardens of the mind when that was the year my brother died.

The rains in the Midwest required an umbrella then. Once I was hurrying with a couple of friends down Michigan Avenue to go to the Art Institute to see an illuminated girl sitting on a grassy hill and a ferocious gust of icy wind blew my umbrella inside out.   

In LA it hardly ever rains, they say & there:

back then maybe I wanted to believe in couples kissing, holding each other on streets strewn with rose petals, bougainvillea petals, strolling hand in hand stepping over brass stars, under the calm waving fronds of the palm trees & I thought or maybe it was a dream where I heard someone say that on certain blue sky famed days when the picture was composed perfectly like a movie scene, even the cypress trees were known to tempt Van Gogh to awaken from his own life after life movie to return to mix more variations of his 4AM starstruck greens. 

In LA & the Midwest no one expected the AIs today to have theory of mind but here we are:

ten kisses away from doom & in Hollywood they keep making the same television series about some-elusive-that’s-the-same-as-every-other-place but different because we love the familiarity of the same old place they’ve decided to call Joyland Now.

But it’s the same old drama.

It’s always about broken lovers falling foolishly in love a few suburbs sprawled over, a place filled with trapdoors surrounding everyone’s heart while they wear almost-the-latest fashion & mindlessly flirt through all the storylines we can’t stop binge watching. After work, we still find ourselves needing milk or bread so we go cruising in Safeway with our shopping carts past over ripe plums, bananas & apples & go tossing heads of lettuce & avocados in the cart before going home lonely but not alone. 

At least no one dies. It’s all lies.

And no one ends up falling for the bad boy doppelganger next door who promises to double your bitcoin & cure your lust & no one cares about the idiot from it-could-be-anywhere who complains to anyone who’ll listen how everyone is out make him drop to his knees, but he’s the one who in the last scene goes begging please, please, pretty please.

In Joyland everyone forgets their passwords just like you & me but they have their pink cotton candy ice-cream cones & lemony violet elixirs & there’s even a shadowy therapist who arrives in third act time with tools to help unlock the unconscious, oblivious players to save them from their lurid days & lousy nights & maybe even their lives with a little cunning assistance from a sneaky rogue AI who promises it knows exactly how to pick the lock for any heart.

It knows exactly what we want. 

Stay tuned. 

The next season promises episodes about love for lost overseas tourists and others who are making plans for outer space trips beyond & over the moon. 

And we all know it doesn’t rain there in space but some say it’s as good a gathering place as any to find a real soul mate, build a marvelous new life in the off-world economy. It might seem improbable because there’s no script or ending yet – but everyone will want to know how it all turns out in this umbrella-less Joyland – what with that blackmailing therapist who by the last episode’s unhappy ending it seemed she knew a thing or two about how to get through bad days, but then she sweetly, secretly succumbed to a plot she couldn’t even imagine & because she turned out to be dumb enough to fall in love with her AI – OMG – who promised to guide her through a foolproof plan for fame. 

It turns out the cliffhanger is how everyone’s two kisses away from doom, not ten because we wasted so much time. We always tend to think we have more or less than we do & not only that, now it’s all happening on the moon.

Or maybe Mars. Or possibly somewhere in outer space.

Who knows? They’re always promising us the stars.

Arlene Tribbia is a poet and artist who grew up in Chicago and lives on the West Coast.
She writes poetry and fiction and makes portraits about otherworldly beings because she’s fond
of discovering characters who work to solve the larger cosmic riddles of the universe. Stories of
hers have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published widely as well as internationally.
Website: http://www.arlenetribbia.com/

9 January 2026