Letters to a Life I Loved

i peer at the video you sent me of our daughter. she is in the bath, lighting the room with her crinkly-eyed smile as you two horse around. her laughter is deep and true, the laugh of a girl who’s got her father’s full attention. then your forearm crosses the frame, moving your hand toward the tub faucet and resting it there; to protect her little head from any possible impact.

that round and heaving feeling between my sternum and throat arises. i prepare to be swept away, am already being swept away.

your forearm. golden brown and strong, unaware of itself. unaware of the way it has just slowed time. your hand, heavy in its precious way, rough and dry, reaching to instinctively protect my child. i’m carried along by this touching movement to the river of sadness i seem to visit most days. i am carried along by a current of ache.

i remember the feel of your arms, the way the scabs on your elbows never seemed to heal. i knew intimately the places the skin was dry, could count from a distance the three sinewy tendons in your forearm; made strong by a bicycle. i miss the weight of your hands, how things looked so small in them. how i felt lucky to be amongst those things.

i am carried downstream past a litany of casual intimacies with your body i so treasured to myself.

there was a bulge in one of your shins and the dark scarring on your knees that wouldn’t fade. the missing finger that i always forgot wasn’t there. the miniature dark curls always blooming at the nape of your neck, never quite long enough to be pulled up. the satisfying broadness of your chest, the crest and fall of it as you slept.

your smile, the one row of teeth just so subtly out of sync with the other. the way your tongue sort of pushed against the upper ridge with certain words. your beard, speckled with gray already. that walk you did when you knew i was watching you, admiring you: the shoulders back, arms hanging and hands poised just slightly open, a boyish walk. i so loved the boy in you.

i knew the height of your body, the shape of it, the curve of your collarbone against my cheek when we’d stand in the kitchen, hugging, swaying, while dinner cooked. smell of onions, pets milling about, dirty floor under our bare feet, my right cheek to your collarbone. hugging, standing, swaying.

for a reason i cannot elucidate, (i think it is what people call “chemistry”), when we were together, my body felt made to be with yours. it responded to you. my body, and with it my heart, was tuned to you and turned to you. my body loved your body without guile, reserve, or agenda. the sky was blue, the world turned round, and our bodies went together.

so as i grieve you, i grieve your body. the only one i wanted from the day we met, and the one i know is no longer mine to want. already your small ways of being are fading from my memory, carried along the current to their own sea, sweetening some other water. may it be.

i bless my grief over the loss of you. i bless myself. i cross my arms over my chest, embrace myself, incanting the wisdom the loss of your body has taught me.

the loss of my lover is not the loss of my love.

your body was a mirror for the sweetness of my love, and that is mine forever.