All Of You

To say that I love you, from the end of each delicate hair, placed so perfectly and precisely on the top of your beautifully crafted head, to the tips of your immaculately painted toes, would be an incredible understatement. I use the word “crafted” because I have difficulty believing that you are a work of fate. You are no coincidence. I don’t believe in a perfect coincidence. It is true that your physical being is one that I constantly find myself in awe of.

You think your eyes are the most boring brown there could possibly be but of course, they aren’t. In the sun, they’re dancing flames and amber tree sap. Always, they have green flecks. When it’s a Sunday afternoon and we’re lying among the white linen preparing ourselves emotionally for the week and watching storm clouds roll over the city, it’s difficult for me to separate your irises from your pupils. Yours are eyes that I will never tire of losing myself in.

There are seven prominent freckles on your nose.  Do you remember that time when we were meant to meet our friends but they didn’t answer their phones and we spent our Saturday night in the kitchen baking in our underwear and drinking too much? I told you I could turn them into a kind of constellation and you let me do it in blue pen. You couldn’t see it at first but I’d made a crescent moon and when I told you, you said that it added to the list of ways in which you were incomplete.

I have difficulty describing the rest of you in full and keeping my brain in working order simultaneously. Your peachy lips make me tremble. You hate your hands; you say they’re your dad’s but they aren’t. Your fingertips could bring light to any man’s life and not a day goes by when I’m not grateful that it’s mine. Your voice is the way I like my coffee; smooth and strong. You rarely stumble on your words.

You think you’re too boney in all the wrong ways and you’ve likened yourself to a knobby old tree on more than one occasion. When I kiss your neck, shoulders, spine, collarbones, hipbones, knees, I hope you know that I’ve always loved old trees. Let me curl myself around your roots. Let me watch you blossom. I hope that in time, you learn to wrap yourself around me.