Ring Around the Rosie
She wears a grey tank top, cut square low across her chest, the edge of her black lace bra rising softly above the fabric. I watch her body move with effortless grace; flowing, slender, alive with natural beauty.
As she plays with the dog, she holds two sticks, taunting him playfully before throwing one. Each time she launches it, she laughs as if surprised by her own joy. The two remain enthralled and entwined in a private game.
She looks at me and makes childish faces, challenging me to be playful on her level. I see her tapping into a childhood she is either remembering or imagining. She is unguarded, silly, wild, and completely free.
I'm in awe of who she is, independent of me. I love seeing this side of her so fully alive, untouched by the world's or her lovers' expectations.
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I want her to stay unburdened, free from the demands that have always been placed on her since she was a child. The looks and stares. The propositions. The relentless pressure to be something for others. I want her to remain untouched by what the world keeps asking of her.
I have to hold myself back from seeing her with those same eyes. I wish her form didn't invoke flames of desire that leap up without restraint. I wish I didn't have to navigate between loving her as a person and wanting her as a woman.
I wish I could move more freely between these two ways of seeing or be fully present in only one at the right time. I wish I could trust that she could know the purity of both. Instead I endure the suspicion of each which breaks both halves of my heart. I mourn that this is a path I must walk alone, that something was taken from her long ago that makes it impossible for her to join me here.
I embrace this repressed longing, and with it, a sickening sense of loss for something so ordinarily fundamental. I know that serenity can come from the firm denial of desire, but it comes at a cost I'm not sure I can pay.
To know that my deepest cravings are part of the same wave that reduces her to an object doesn't diminish the desire. It taints that passion with something bitter. The sorrow from this knowledge doesn't dissolve either the desire or the joy. Instead it reveals the painful space between loving someone and wanting them.
This is what I carry when I look at you. This is the complexity of loving you completely. My foil is the gratefulness of being given the privilege to have this cosmic debate with myself. My sword is being able to puncture my own armour with the pure love I feel for and from you.
