The creases at the corners of your eyes are only visible close up. I like to touch there with my fingers because the lines are so faint it seems they can be brushed away. Erased.
Then there is the elongated diamond above your lip, below your nose, where the skin is sunk in. It disappears when you smile but I graze it with my tongue most times we kiss.
Your eyebrows arch subtly. They are thick but not obtrusive. When you have been sleeping the dark hairs are in disarray. I smooth them for you but you're never embarrassed.
When you talk quickly your nostrils move. When you're lost in thought your mouth twitches. Just one corner, like it is trying to smile.
Your face fits in my cupped hands. I like to pull it towards mine or press it to my chest. Your harsh cheekbone on my sacrum.
Someday, when you're much older, there will be wrinkles on your forehead. The delicate slope of your nose will be bent. The tender pockets below your eyes weary. Your chin loose and jaw heavy.
I have never though before of how you will age. To me you've always and only have been a momentary being. Present or absent. Here or there. Never then and now, or now and tomorrow. We just are.
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The cluster of hair that curls down the back of her neck catches easily with the slightest shift in the air flow: a breeze, the wind, or my breath. In the heat of the sun it moistens with sweat and glistens in more precise curls. She pulls her shoulders up to her ears when I wrap one of those locks around my fingers. She does not see that I touch my lips after. I like the salty taste. I speak and as my tongue moves across my mouth to sound out words the taste comes back to me.
In the evening I can smell the day upon her. She leans across me for a book on the coffee table. The top of her head brushes past my nose and in those few seconds it takes for her fingers to grip the spine and her arm to retract a lofty aroma presses upon me: city street, printing paper, afternoon cigarette, sunlight, damp concrete, and her lavender shampoo beneath it all. Strong and subtle as a heart beat.
In the morning she rarely wakes before me. I open my eyes to her smooth figure illuminated by the early light, poised amid the sheets half covering our bodies. My first kiss, fresh and on the neck, causes the pathetic, minute hairs on her right arm to stand as stiff as a thousand masts for boats on a sea of gold and vitamin D.
I do not tell her these things. They are too much for me. They are the pieces of her that are mine alone.
