Let’s say we’re playing truth or dare, minus the dare. Here’s a truth:
the bedtime stories I used to tell you weren’t so much about rescues
or heroics as they were about the way your smiles condensed like
the bars of a cage around my heart, or how the bruises you forgot to
hide come evening made of the sunset some distant angel’s wings.
Surely there is a word for this; in the dictionary it must stand between
fragile and implicit, unless perhaps it is indexed under love; unconditional.
Truth: I think your name nests in the tender nets of my capillaries, and
behind my eyelids there is always the flutter of your little-girl skirts,
in my ears the echo of your voice spelling out fairytales and numbers.
I could write an encyclopedia out of your silences. Yesterday, when the
horizon burned, you were in my arms painted in shades of dawn,
so light it felt as though you were only a doll I would have made out
of volcanic stones and little bird bones. Truth: I was terrified I was not
holding you closely, or gently, or carefully, enough, and—
I do not believe there is a word that would enclose all that you are
when you stand on the sidewalk and wave smiling at me, through the
car’s windows and the widening distances between you and me; nor is
there one for the feeling that settles when at night the clouds breathe
with the rise and fall of your chest and my shadow sinks over the doorway.
This is not something I will ever tell you: there is weight enough on the
fragile scaffolds of your shoulders and in the hollows of your spine;
but if there is a word, in any language, for the way your eyes shine when
you stand dragonfly-bright on the balcony with your arms spread and my heart
is strung raw and stuttering in the expectancy of a dive into the light, it
is not one I ever want to know.
