She wears no rings. Her ears are double-pierced, hanging with astrolabes and star-studded. She wears two necklaces—one is a golden cross, and the second is a white diamond. Her wrists are thick with bracelets. But no rings.
She no longer wears gloves. I wonder if this is by her choice, or practicality. Her hands are white and creamy. Butter-soft, and when I clasp one in my hand, she feels oddly fragile, though I know she has withstood worse.
There is a crafted beauty to her and I think perhaps her sculptor could not quite fashion rings out of his portfolio. When she smiles in greeting, her eyes are dwarfed by the cherry red of her cheeks. Tiny crescents of ocean. I kiss her cheek and feel her eyelashes soft against my skin.
The park is heavy with promenaders. We negotiate prams and nannies and stray children; pensioners walking prim poodles. The sun bites the back of my neck.
We haven’t met since before the war. When we were both brides flushed with the shining attention drawn by a kneeling man in a garden of roses.
Her wedding was a ripple in time. She was gorgeous in white, adorning the arm of her father, first, and then her husband, in a house of God, under the eyes of God.
Deep into the wilderness, there is a grove secluded from the public eye. I have never known another soul to walk there. It is shabbier than the rest of the park, overgrown and half wild. An anti-Eden: I think that God cannot see us here.
The bench where we sit is chilled by shade and I am drawn closer to her warmth. The green of the trees accentuates her blue-and-black dress; I think of how the forest caresses the night sky. I would kiss her there, under the stars, as I kiss her now. Her lips are paper-soft.
There are no sparks; no fireworks. We ache and undulate, oceans roiling within and we muffle the sounds that mouths make when they work. I wonder if she muffles them for him.
I wonder a lot, but very little when she is opening, like a flower in the sun, wrapping her arms around me, pushing her forehead into mine.
When she is like this, I forget that when she goes home she becomes mummy and she will melt into her husband’s arms as she has done mine. That when I get home, I will breathe only the colour black. Thick and suffocating, it winds down my throat, and only her oxygen in my lungs can clear it. I die on a hill of cliches, and find her alone to be new.
She wakes me from dreamlike musings of reality with soft kisses to the side of my neck. I am a feeling creature in her arms. Nothing but stupid sentiment, irrational and insolent in the face of reason. Of truth. She cradles my face and I feel like a virgin again, brimming with excitement rather than the usual dread.
I know, without reservation, that she cannot remain in my possession. My grasp is firm, and I have known what it is to hold onto something and never let go. Yet, as we hear bicycle bells and carrying laughter, she pulls from me. My planet spirals out of orbit.
She doesn’t feel it like I do. Like a tug at her ribs, or a hole in her heart.
And I hate her for it.
I hate that it is easy for her. She slips from loving me to loving her husband like changing clothes, an old habit, an easy routine.
Falling through longings, I find I am made low by the weight of my own desire. My own wretched flesh which, goose-flesh rising, wants only to touch her.
When she leaves, I will know everything there is to know about love. The bicycles chime like church bells and I hear her children laughing on the breeze.
They are whispers in time, and I am centuries-deep.
I watch her push two rings onto her left hand. The sun bounces off the stones; dazzling.
