I fell in love with Timothy very early on a Sunday morning. He was sleeping at the time. I know that could be construed as creepy. It's not as though I was watching him through high-powered night vision binoculars from a nearby tree. (That would be creepy.) I was sitting up in bed beside him, unable to sleep, but unsure of whether I wanted to turn on a reading light and likely wake him.
I looked over at him. He was sprawled on his stomach. I felt restless and a little jealous, as though sleep was a party that everyone else had been invited to. I decided that a light wouldn't bother him, then I wondered how he was even breathing with his face buried in the pillow.
The room was dark (obviously too dark to read) but the curtains weren't drawn and I could trace the lines of his body. I looked closer. He was breathing; the gentle rise and fall of his breath pulled at me. I watched his chest fill and ebb. Moonlight illuminated the smooth skin of his back, his arms, bluish and pearlescent, he looked like Grecian marble in the darkness. A sinuous work of art carved from stone, liberated from the Uffizi Gallery or a fountain somewhere and somehow imbued with light and life and breath.
Ok, maybe it is a little creepy.
I didn't turn on the light. I curled up between the deep, tranquil inhalations of his breaths like the gentle rocking of a hammock on a summer day. Even in the lapping pool of calm cool beauty, I wanted to wake him, to tell him about it, to explain how peaceful and remote and simply gorgeous he looked in the moonlight. Wake up! I am falling in love with you! It feels amazing!
But will I still love you when you're awake?
"Art hid with art, so well perform'd the cheat,
It caught the carver with his own deceit" (Ovid)
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