The thing you call love

When you look-see self naked in the mirror or chin-down, what’s the first part you notice? When I look at mine, the first part sticks out is the knees, like two bald old men huddled together on park bench. Same time bench, every day bench. My knees are loyal to one another in the way only two old souls forgot by the rest of life can be. It’s cruel of you to part them, but you look all serious now, and say time for play is over.

The second part’s the right wrist. The one with the copper band round it with the nice words. I’ll let you look at the words, if you promise not to read them back to me. I can’t bear the thought. Your voice is one of the things I wish I’d never noticed about you. So only read them to yourself, if you know how to read. If not, I’ll let you guess what they are, and what they mean to me.

Hold my wrist in the air. Feel embarrassed by the way metal hangs loose over bony protrusion. Feel frightened it’ll fall, and then just anyone can read it.

Put your lips on the kiss mark, under my kiss bracelet. Where they were meant to go, ’cause they look all wrong on your face anyway. You get mad at me when I tease, so I chew my words until I can pass through them.

You say bracelets aren’t meant for the bath, anyway, and take it away before I have time to tell you it won’t rust. You’d just tell me, everything rusts. Even kiss marks. Even bracelets.

Next, run your sponge over the mound of my belly-button. Like a house, under-earth hobbit hovel with its window-blinds ever up. No matter how skinny I get. I tell you there’s fairies live in my belly, under the button, and you put your ear to listen, but they know, so don’t make a sound. After a minute, you let up, and squeeze the sponge, bringing deluge over my poor, parched fairies.

My breasts, you could wrap around your throat. Plant a nipple on either side of your face, and whistle. You and I could laugh, except you seldom laugh now, and my nipples are grown cold. You wash my breasts like cancerous lumps, malignant under your touch, under your every waking eye. You prod and sponge angrily, like you wanna make my breasts disappear. Like maybe you want me gone off the face of the earth, and silent, shock-still as only peek-a-boo children and mice know how to be, I let you.

Say nothing when you erase my breasts, because underneath all the hanging flesh, you’ve revealed a heart. Stop-watch, beating arrhythmic in great confusion. Hearts, too, ought to be left outside the bath.

You lean close, closer still, and purse your lips against my beating heart, hold in place a moment, then go back to remodelling my chest, moulding my nipples in your warm, wide palm.

My face, you leave for last, and I fret because you were rough on my neck, and I didn’t have the courage to tell you. It takes courage to speak when you’re silent as long as I.

But when your fingers reach my face, you slowly put down the sponge. Splash water on your soaked fingertips, and gently massage under my eyes. Hold your thumbs to the pressure valves behind my eyebrows. Press against the sides of my nose to grace me, release me, of all the pain I must’ve accumulated during our lifelong bath. See me smiling under your shaking knuckles, and for just a precious minute, smile back.

Towel-dry is complete silence, as you pat away the beads from every crevice, every nook, and at my age, the body’s an infinite, winding map of them. And you, patient with each one. Then, bundle me into my housecoat and it’s off to the races. Kitchen or sitting room? You know I hate sitting in our bedroom alone all day. Feels too close to death, so you wheel me into the sitting room. Move me to my easy chair, not because it’s easy against my limbs, but because it’s mine. And because I told you once, ages ago, how much I loved this, my chair, which I bought with my first reporter money, and you remembered.

You take ages standing in the doorway, longer even than it takes for you to dry-pat my back, then you say,

“I’ll just pop out a moment. You alright, love?”

And every single morning, I think how fortunate, I, to have my easy chair, and still, after everything, be the thing you call love. I think about it, while you’re gone, and think about you several times on the hour, counting closer to the second you walk through that door again.

I’m alright, aye.

And now, for something completely different :) Another facet of myself. Or perhaps just the old one in a new light. Thanks for reading.

I recently put out my first book (the first in a fantasy trilogy), and am working on the next two. So there’s a chance I’ll be talking about that, sometimes.

So if you’re someone who enjoys that kinda writing, well, why not subscribe? It’s free. And I’m desperate. So there, honesty.

Photos: Terra e Cielo by Giuseppe Agnello, Convitto delle Arti, Noto, Sicily. All photos taken by me.