“I don’t know if anyone could ever love me,” you say.
“Don’t you see how I worship you?” I scream with my thoughts, but you can’t hear me anyway. I debate, asking you, whispering in your ear.
Instead, I am silent, unsure of how to comfort you. I don’t want to tell you that I love you, not yet.
So I close my eyes and trace my fingers along the lines of your jaw, cheeks, nose, and eyebrows.
I touch you like one would handle a porcelain teacup. You could break if I don’t think about keeping my fingers light as I follow the fine craftsmanship all across your back.
I don’t tell you the words of praise and admiration I trace into your back as you crane into my touch. The body absorbs what the mind cannot fathom.
I place kisses on your belly, the back of your leg, and the places that are never loved. When I love, I want to love all of you truly.
“No one has ever touched me like this, so softly,” you say, and right then I want to burst into tears. How dare they! How dare they not treat you like artisan bread, like a mural in an alleyway, like freshly molded pottery before it enters the kiln.
What a crime it is that you have never known what it is like to be held for the sake of holding, to know touch that has no fine print and no malice.
You quiver and shake when I touch you like the novelty of this feeling is too much. I make a joke about how sensitive you are, so maybe for a moment, the reality of why is just a joke instead of reality. And for a moment, you can cope.
You don’t like being looked at in these intimate moments, so I think about how I would describe your eyes in a poem instead. I’ve had ample opportunities for this, and I have come up with the following:
The sky with just the right amount of clouds, the kind of day with a light breeze that makes you want to pick blueberries.
The first drop of rain. It always seems to land on your face, like a kiss from Mother Nature.
The newest flower on an orchid plant, only a bud the day before. It is the same color you want at our wedding. It feels like such a far-off thing to me, a vague concept, but to you, it feels like the Save the Dates have just been sent in the mail.
The rest are a bit much.
—
I remember to massage your toes, the ball of your foot, the arch, the heel. You don't like feet, including your own foot, but I am here to love the parts of yourself that you can't love.
I pray to you in my thoughts that you can feel my love through my thumbs rubbing healing circles into your tense shoulders. That somehow, my actions will help you remember what a divine being you are, a god with amnesia.
What are you the god of? I think, maybe, that you are the god of moments. Humorous glances from across an aisle, Dutch ovens, singing too loud on night car rides, vicious tickle fights that end in sweet kisses, interrupting each other at work, finishing each other's thoughts and sentences, taking my glasses off when I fall asleep with them on, tiny routines that are barely considered routines but are done almost without thinking all the same.
I, for the first time, feel seen by a deity. There is no higher power, no sin. There is no wrong. There is only the reverence I give to you, that is expelled by every cell in my body, that consumes every waking thought.
There is you, and there is me. There is us. And that is enough.
Don't you know I worship you?
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