Flesh: A Tender Truth Some Tale...All the Taller, the Better!

Flesh

She lies undressed at last, at long last, her and her lover, together. Bodies stretched out on her grandmother’s quilt. He checks if she is cold, but no. Not with him.

Both shy but bare all the same, by the low light of a pink salt lamp. It looks like a chunk of rose quartz. The selfsame pink. Next to it her glow in the dark Mother Mary figure, its black plastic base chipped. Old. From her childhood, he knows. A gift from her mother. Treasured, for her mother is gone. Gone far too young. When she was seven.

Her father too. Later.

A heart attack. Not that she speaks of it all much. Yet.

But the Mother Mary is right at home here.

Her bedroom bohemian in her penchant for patterned fabrics in velvets and silks and old textured wallpapers and curios and crystals and seashells. Ferns there, and there, and there, an orchid here by the bedside. Plastic pale green Mother Mary blessing the orchid. It flowers always. Purple and yellow. Blossoming. Always. Smelling of damp glens.

And there, a bit beyond, her comically large rocking chair for reading, dwarfing all else, with her bookcase, bursting, in a corner, more ferns above. And a mobile above too, dangling by gut, and a hook, made of worn coloured glass.

A close friend had made it. A friend who hanged herself. He knows this too.

She says she likes to collect things with hidden stories.

Lives lived.

Old books with inscriptions in them are her favourite of all.

And again he knows.

And he likes that he knows.

But that robe.

A Japanese style robe with billowing sleeves, long, in blue, or is it lavender, in this light he cannot tell, nor remember, with orange and pink blossoms flung over the rusting bed railing. Blue or is it lavender, but he knows all too well the shape of her in that robe. Again, he likes that he knows, all too well. And in this now. Her inner sanctum.

He counts himself lucky. Privileged. Her gift.

Where she is just herself.

That robe, that robe she sometimes wears all day long, typing away, or scribbling in her notebook, notebook after notebook, when he sits by, waiting. Just to be by her.

That long Japanese robe, blue, or lavender, with its billowing sleeves, that robe he adores her in he has decided but not more than as she is right now, in nothing. Just flesh. Soft and inviting flesh. In this room.

A space revealed from the other side of a closed green door, with a brass knob, just on the other side just like her naked body.

He is enchanted by it all. And by her.

The green door she has been sure to lock.

It looks so different by this light, their backdrop, their stage, their altar, in this charmed bedroom together.

So naked now.

But at least the light is dim. Intimate.

The room changed somehow, he thinks, with the dark purple curtains, more velvet, drawn, not a peep, keeping the daylight at bay, so very changed by the warm pink light.

Summer sun be gone. Like the poem she read to him.

And she is radiant in the glow from the lamp.

He can almost taste his heart beating. It is her first time. And his.

She is suddenly rueful of the patches of stubble she has missed with her cheap razor, stubble she catches in the light, but all the same, she revels in their nakedness, in her inner sanctum with him. Bodies so bare. Innocent. But longing.

At long last.

Soon forgetting things like stubble.

Nothing matters but this nakedness.

Two bodies exquisitely bare. For one another.

Both nervous but emboldened by youth. And by love yet unuttered.

They explore each other’s bodies delicately as young lovers falling in love are wont to do, with a strange fervour and yet a gentleness all the same.

“What’s this?” he asks of a long scar extending lengthwise down her belly, just above her deep, cavernous belly button. A belly button he adores too he has decided.

Another gift.

His.

“Oh I swallowed a lead fishing sinker when I was a little kid.”

“You what?” He stifles a laugh.

Bemusement hangs though on his sweet lips, as he tries to encourage her, locking.

She adores those lips she has decided. She feels encouraged. She goes on.

“Well I’d found it in the cubbyhole when my gran was in the bank and I’d balanced it oh so carefully between my front teeth, thinking it was a neat trick. God knows why she had a fishing sinker in her cubbyhole. But she was always leaving me in the car. Bored. Of course my gran had to yell at me when I showed her my balancing act, and catching fright, I swallowed the bloody thing. I was devastated. I couldn’t eat red meat until after my surgery. And I was such a carnivore. And all the nurses gave me to drink was this sickly sweet orange squash. Game. Something about electrolytes I think. A sports drink. To this day, even the smell of it makes me retch.” He loves to see her animated, a born storyteller she is.

His. This gift. His entire, here.

He laughs. Relaxing.

He knows she won’t hold it against him.

Her own laughter bubbles over, at herself, shaking her head, meeting his laughter, like water to water.

Natural. Unforced.

The early beginnings of sharing stories and finding words to put to closeness felt. Spurred, she tells him of another time. When her grandmother came out of the bank to find her a grinning four year old with her grandmother’s spare yellowed set of false teeth in her mouth. In the cubbyhole in case of an emergency. Her grandmother leaving nothing to chance, ever.

Yet another cubbyhole find in her curious, treasure troving days.

But she is still that peculiar curious creature he thinks.

Her bedroom filled with treasures for those who know to look close enough.

Pay attention. For he knows. And he likes all the more that he knows.

But a big eyed four old grinning with false teeth, pressed up against the car window. He sees it now...

And he laughs with his entire body this time, a generous laughter, spilling over, tears streaming, a resonating laughter, muffled only by the thick purple velvet curtains. So comfortable with her, and how she loves to hear him laugh, putting her ever more at ease, shaking his head this time and tousling her short curls with a familiar affection, a familiarity she’s coming to savour.

He can picture her so very vividly as a child and he loves her all the more still.

Still so the same he knows. And he likes that he knows this too. His to know.

And he thinks again how truly he loves her all the more. Still. But unuttered again.

No matter.

No matter at all for words still unsaid.

His laughter to her is gift enough, a gift of so many, a gift like all the rest she’s coming to hold dear.

Hers.

The lot of them.

All hers.

“I have other scars, smaller ones,” she tells him, wishing to be ever more candid with him, wishing to share more with him now that they are finally bare and vulnerable, bare but only for the scent of her perfume that lingers, marrying the damp glen of the orchid bedside, a perfume he knows well, as with so much these days, relishing the familiarity of it by his own turn, a perfume of sweet almonds and vanilla. Like cake.

He drinks her in, heady scent and all.

It is a pleasurable kind of vulnerability and not the unsettling kind but the kind that thrills a little.

“Here, on my back.”

If only he could draw, he thinks.

She flips, turning over to show him, resting on her stomach.

“They’re smaller and harder to see,” she tells him, inching her back, the secret slope of her, towards the glow of the warm pink tinted light. If only I could draw, he thinks again. “I was in an accident, a car accident, when I was around two. Flung out the car window. A farmer pulled out in front of us from a gravel road. Barbed wire caught my fall. My mom’s friend in the passenger seat was paralysed.”

He doesn’t laugh this time.

Stillness descends.

He weaves his hands tenderly over her scars, as if he might heal them with his caress.

But he would never wipe away her scars.

He loves them as he does her. But he doesn’t say a word. There is time enough. For words.

Instead, they are quiet for a while, the moment hallowed.

Sacred is the closeness in the space between them, mapping each other’s bodies as unchartered territories that they are eager to learn and explore, inch by inch.

And all the while with tenderness.

For hallowed too are these bodies. Not to be mined of their wealth.

“I still don’t like cars really, or driving,” she says, whether to him or herself he can’t quite tell, staring off. Then she returns to him, fixing her kind brown eyes on him, so revealing always, wide eyed in earnest.

Another gift.

Hers but all his.

“Especially not when they’re fast. My mom said that after that accident, I used to bury my nails into the car seat until my knuckles went white. I don’t like long distance driving and highways. I mean if I have to I have to. But I’d really rather not.” She blushes. Stops for a moment and then. “I dream of trains, train journeys on a track watching scenery go by in big windows. Dinner carts, bunk beds, steady. But long car trips, they terrify the shit out of me. I’m not proud of it, but I guess it is what it is. So these scars run a little deeper.”

Eyes now downcast.

He stays quiet longer but takes her hand in his hand and twirls it, interlocking fingers, his hand engulfing hers, so tiny.

She is naked he realises but for the ring he gave her, with her most treasured stone of them all for all her crystals, the brilliant green jade stone at its rose gold centre.

She never takes it off.

He loves her for this, yet again how he loves her, and again unuttered.

His.

In mute solidarity, he holds her hand, so tiny.

She likes that he is compassionate that way. She can trust him.

And these hands, hands that engulf hers.

Intrinsically knowing what to do when conversation takes a slightly darker turn.

Down past scars that haunt and hurt, raw to the touch, and deep seated memories, raw to recollect, that haunt and hurt.

Theirs is a burgeoning love affair and they are learning, with time, to speak each other’s languages. Some silent languages that demand a certain animal knowing.

Other times by mimicry as lovers so often do, and yet again, even if clumsily in their beginnings, those other times when they allow their lover to be led by blind empathy as they stumble slowly but surely in the right direction towards each other.

Now that they are on the subject of flesh, and her scars are out of the way, she feels readier to ask after his scars, deeper and far worse than her own, by his arms, each a vast stretch of scar tissue, such glorious gut wrenching mapping, usually hidden, almost shameful to him she thinks but to her so beautiful, hidden always by the longer sleeved shirts he wears no matter the weather. Until this very day, she was yet to see him topless.

Except for that once, fleeting, hiking, when he’d taken off his shirt to quickly dip in cooler waters, when she’d said nothing, but quicker still to put his shirt back on.

So unlike most men of his age, all too eager to walk around preening, showing off.

“Oh, I was skewered like a kebab, each side, by a shattered glass sliding door I ran into as a kid.” He tries to laugh, but it is not like before at all but wounded. “Before stricter glass regulations. It was an old house. Real seventies kitsch. My mom loved that. But yeah. My older brother blamed himself for not minding me better while my parents had nipped off to the shop.”

She pauses, looking down, nodding slightly, but then pausing again, unmoving, then fixing her brown eyes on him once more, and ever more wide eyed, but this time wet, blinking back her feelings for him, for his pain, his scars.

She is so very touched.

Overwhelmed.

Then she speaks, her tone a low vibration, sad.

“I blamed myself, when I was younger, for my cousin’s fall when we were rock climbing at the beach,” she commiserates, searching all the while for the right words.

Not wanting to be glib.

For this secret, this gift, more precious than any other, this gift he has given to her.

“I was older,” she speaks hushed almost for all it just the two of them, green door safely locked. “And I was a better rock climber. And he fell and split his head. I must have been about six. Maybe seven. Always climbing back then. Climbing, climbing..."She trails off, choking on a tear. Gently wiping one, escaped. Not to make it about her. His.

"I hid the whole day after he’d been rushed off for stitches, all day long behind the banister in a darkened corner of my grandparent’s house, waiting to hear news that he would be okay. Picking nervously at the maroon carpeting. Just waiting and waiting for what felt like forever to hear he’d be okay.” She sighs, heavy. “Your brother must have felt awful.”

She runs her index finger up and down the scar on his right shoulder blade.

“And you. How awful,” her voice trails off. Again. Again...A stray tear.

She wants to wrap every inch of her body around him. But not yet. Still shy.

“I think they make you look like a fallen angel,” she tells him, once she is ready again, hoping these are the right words, finally.

She means it with all her heart as only the young can.

But what she wants to tell him is that she is falling in love with him.

But she doesn’t. She can’t. Not yet.

It hangs in the air, potent, liberating, but unsaid.

For now.

For now they are simply flesh and stories of scars.

Even though she knows he feels the same.

Just flesh and stories for now, finding the forgiving light of a pink salt lamp.

And a lover’s touch.

There is time enough for professing love. For words beyond flesh and stories.

That can come.

And they curl contentedly to fit their shapes into one another, even feet cradled in feet, and marvel and wonder and take in all that they have learned of their lover, their first.

And there is time enough.

The Birthday by March Chagall