Published: January 31, 2008

In those days making love was clean because minds were. There was a sense of beginning then, between her toes.  There was a breath of morning in the room, even deep into the evening when he would wander down the hall and find her door ajar, slip in and find her sleeping on her books. Everything was small—he thought that now, when in his mind ages afterwards he could pick her up with all of two fingers and lift her out of the little cabinet in his memory. They would wake at a rock face on the edge of night and she seemed—she appeared—irritated to be trembling, standing upright, raw, behind every joint: open, to the bright sweet cold. But, this was the way that she was beautiful to him: the chill fabric of his medium, her oil stain on his hands. In this way, everywhere he held her she felt like a bath when you are underneath it and when he was not holding her he felt like he was looking on her from the end. Morning, is the beginning, is the beginning of a day.