A Love Letter to the Human Body

To My Beloved Reader: When I'm hurting I touch the ridges of my knuckles and think what a miracle it is that I'm here. When I'm lonely I run my hands down my skin and marvel at its warmth. When I'm fatigued I am glad because I know that my muscles are repairing themselves. Look after yourself. Your body really, really wants you to. I love you <3

A Love Letter to the Human Body.

My father used to say that our blemishes were braille, and that if you cared enough to look you'd see that they told stories of the lives we lived. He was a chef at heart. A lifetime of dealing with kitchen knives and hot oven trays left his hands and forearms so thick with scars they were like a toddler's artwork: criss-crossed, dotted and messy, knotted and lined as the trunk of the oldest tree. My father was a tall and heavy-handed man--but when he handled pastry, or listened to a child's nonsensical tale, or held my mother in his arms, he did so with fantastic elegance. He had an eye for the minutiae of life.

I inherited the kitchen at age twenty after he passed, bless the old fool's soul. And though I can only strive to love life as he did, I did inherit his appreciation for the body. We are crafted for love. Built to hold hands. We are physically constructed as perfect vessels of affection.

This, I came to properly appreciate at age twenty-three, when a woman called Yanni ordered her breakfast from our humble family kitchen, and caught my eye. And we smiled. Oh, we smiled.

Let's start with the face. The nose is a bridge from the eyes to the mouth. A million expressions of minute nuance and subtext can be formed in a second flat; a declaration of love or hate, or a warning not to spill the secret understood in an instant. Yanni's face is round, her eyes long and curtained with lashes.

When I brought her food to her table I sat opposite her in the booth. We said some silly things. Little awkward flits of the eyelids as we glanced at one another and broke away, flustered. Her lips are full and small, and twist into a smile. That smile. Faces softened like the butter on her scone.

I took her plate, and she stayed in her booth. Doodling to pass the time. After I closed up the kitchen that evening I came to her booth and we said something more, and I took her hand in mine. Crests of knuckles like mountains. We are built to hold hands: five fingers laced into five, the impulse present from the time we are babies and we grasp anything within our reach. Yanni's hands were cool. The contact took my breath away. I made us iced chocolates to sip on, and we chatted for hours in the booth with our legs extended over the leather. Her nails were white.

Then we locked up the bakery. I stowed the key in its pot plant out back, found Yanni's hand once more, and we ran out into the village. Feet: our means of travel. Balance is effortless. We ran over cobblestones, over bridges and hills, past market stalls and cardboard posters advertising vacancies in shop windows; we ran under the jacaranda trees, and through the throngs of swamp flax where your trousers snag and your shoes pick up seedheads. Yanni's hair flew out behind us. Laughter, laughter, whipped away in the wind. By the time we ran down muddy steps to a little empty cove we were gasping for air like a lifeline, and keeled over on a stretch of black sand.

Salt and vegetation in our noses. The call of gulls and the swell of the sea. The line between the green of the ocean and the blue of the sky is such that I felt I could reach out and pluck the horizon from its place. Yanni leant sideways onto my shoulder. Her hair fell down my side. The sunlight reached us only in splotches through the trees overhead, glinting on the shells by the water's edge. The cove was quite empty except for us, so we stayed until the salt hurt our throats. We pondered the absurdity of life and the reaches of the universe, and such trivial matters as what brand of jam was best. The sun dipped in the sky.

And then we kissed under the jacaranda trees. There is nothing so intimate as a kiss: Yanni's fingertips on my cheeks, on my neck so lightly it tickled, her lips against mine like a breath of wind. It lasted two minutes, slow and gentle as the surge of the ocean before us. Little birds waddled in the shallows.

I want to stay here, I told her. I want to stay here till the sun wraps right back around.

Yanni found my hands with hers and we kissed again. Isn't it beautiful how we fit together like the tide into a bay, our heads tilting without thought, our lips perfectly soft?

We took to the water while the sun was setting, our bodies tautened by the thrill of fresh romance and desperate for a release. So we stripped to our underwear. The straggling sun caught our bodies. We tiptoed hand in hand over the shells by the shoreline, made silly noises at the chill of the water lapping our feet, and plunged forward into the cold. We paddled till the seabed fell away. Our feet extended like bait to the abyss, should some storybook monster swim up to drag us down.

And so that was us: two small heads bobbing out to sea, blocked from the village's sight by vegetation so that we were utterly alone, and that moment was ours to share like fine wine. Yanni flung her hair back. Wind rippled the water's surface. I took her in my arms and we kissed again, our legs kicking to keep us afloat so that sometimes our feet knocked each other. The ridges of her shoulders, hips and collarbone, the warmth of her skin against mine--it all fit, her form into mine. High on the prospect of her company, numberless days ahead of us like the unseeable depths below. We embraced till our lungs couldn't take it and we kept slipping below the water from exhaustion, then we swam back to shore.

The little birds had been pecking at our clothes in our absence. Yanni scolded them and tried to pet one, but they hopped away, chirruping. Sand clung to our feet like oysters. Yanni's body glistened from its plunge, the angles of her limbs and torso sharpened by the way the moisture catches light. She pulled her clothes back over her bra and underwear.

The birds flew away.

Let's go back to my place, Yanni told me.

On our way back to hers I tripped on the cobblestones and tore open my knee. Blood ran into my shoe. Yanni took me in her arms and spun me like a dancer till the pain died away, and we waltzed through the village streets. The cold night air never caught my body alone. We flitted through alleys and shortcuts, past a thousand drawn curtains and sternly closed front doors. Tall wooden houses formed a maze. It turned into a game under the night clouds. Left turn, right turn, left again. Kiss me for the hell of it.

We found the cheapest wine we could on our commute, so when we reached Yanni's house we drank like royalty. Her place was very small, with too much furniture tripping over itself like the seashells. She tended to my knee on her living room couch. There was too much to say in one night--but we certainly tried. Silly little anecdotes. Childhood stories. The pain of losing a parent. We talked and laughed our throats half to death, then we kissed on the couch until the wine was quite finished, and our hands explored under clothing over the hills and valleys of our bodies. Whispers in the dark. Sweat on her top lip as I kissed her. Her legs hooked over mine.

I said her name, and she said mine--and I'll never forget its sound on her lips.

I undressed her on the couch. Her damp bra on the floor. She undressed me, and my muscles tightened at her touch. The couch cushions slowly slipped out of shape as we kissed and tangled ourselves into one sweat form. Her scent like the scones fresh from the bakery oven. Goosebumps, and hairs standing on their ends. Our naked bodies cast shadows in the living room light, every point of contact a precise translation of our lust for human connection: hands laced, legs entwined, tongues wrapped into one. There is no greater privilege than to see someone at their most vulnerable.

The birds would be roosting somewhere outside. There was no telling the hour.

Yanni stared up at me. She spoke to me, and her eyes took my breath away as the simple contact of her hands had before. Yanni gave me her body that night, and I gave her mine. Hot with sweat and lust. A moment so tender I almost crumbled. Sex in the quiet ambience of the night, to the rhythm of our shallow breathing. Fingers splayed, words, all turning to dust outside our embrace. Her body arrested me. She was all I knew. Beyond the naughtiness of sex there is purity: two lives and souls colliding with absolute trust.

The following morning we walked to the park. We bought a carton of cherries from an old man who insisted on counting out our change, bless his age and courtesy; and we sat under the jacaranda trees with our sides pressed together. The grass stained our shirts and the sun burned our skin, but we lay there all morning in the gentle breeze.

The little birds were chirping again. We talked about life.

Yanni told me she wanted to be my girlfriend. Somewhere along the park field a bunch of kids were kicking about a ball. Somewhere farther on an old couple were shuffling along with their arms linked. They picked their way through the world as one being.

I still have a scar on my knee from that night. Yanni's Scar--a blemish which tells a story. I showed it to my children, and now I show it to my grandchildren. Sometimes dear Yanni pitches in. Mostly she just scolds me for forgetting the details.

The End.

All characters, narrator-inclusive, are fictitious.

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