Sixteen

Oh, How You Fit Me

Never have I put my body beside a man’s and had it fit so well. Bespoke. Your arm under the crook of my neck can be there for hours and still my neck is not sore. You turn toward the back of me; I turn toward the back of you. I am home. I love that you are patient and calm and don’t mind if I drink though you haven’t touched a drop in nearly twenty years. I have autonomy with you—we both go where we want to go when we want to go there. Tricky thing is I don’t get to go where I want very often. But still. I love watching your profile when you sit at your computer. Because you are lean from packing horses and walking up mountain passes and then back down, all summer long, the bones of your body jut out. Maybe because of this, you look even taller than you are already; when I hold you, the blades of your shoulders are like climbing grips or handlebars on a midway ride. Even the bones in your fingers are chiselled. When a mosquito lands on your arm, you lift your finger with such calm assurance the insect doesn’t know to move. You are deadly rational. When you’re sitting in the kitchen chair putting a battery into your headlamp, glasses pushed down the bridge of your nose, your moustache white, I think of Geppetto, but when you’re in the mountains with your red-checked neckerchief and cowboy hat, then I think of Indiana Jones. Sometimes, late at night when you’ve got your headlamp on because we’re in bed and I’ve been trying to sleep, I watch you read about people who have been thrust into extreme situations—Scott’s failed return from the South Pole, or the more exuberant Shackleton, your books piled on your bedside table, precariously, all non-fiction, all things explorational, geological, paleontological—some nights I look at you and think, How did this man come to be with me?