I thought that I might find some kind of catharsis in it- the way the grooves on the skin of your fingers brush against the grain of my own flesh and charge each cell. There's something in a touch that gives it the potential to reach those inarticulable, carnal depths which words cannot. Before you speak, you gingerly cradle my hand and pull it towards you and then I know: there's no primal comfort in the way you run the ball of your thumb over my cracked and aching knuckles. Your hazel eyes, with their concerned gaze and your mouth with that empathetic pout- they don't cause every tendon in my body to tremble or catalyze the aching of my heart to spill its heavy contents out for you to bear on my behalf. I know it's nothing you've done- nothing that you're lacking or some shortcoming that causes a schism too great for me to overlook and reach out to you anyway. I know that you want me to unfold to you, like a tender work of literature whose bindings melt in large, eager hands. It's not that I can't do that- reveal myself like a ripe rose flexing its petals, reaching to stroke its own leaves on a dewy morning. I can be open. I can be vulnerable. I can. But not for you.

His eyes, they're brown. They're not a romantic tawny chocolate or a stormy amber, but a very monochromatic and cool stone brown. And I can read sonnets in your eyes when in his, all I can see is a dark reflection of myself which makes me look as small and fragile as I feel when I wake up and every muscle in my body fights the carnal drive for survival. Can you imagine that? And how silly it sounds, to say that my own body fights itself because my heart wants life and my mind knows that every step of it will be a struggle to find a place where I can be safe and warm. You are warm, but you are too tender of spirit, with those eyes that sing stories and hands which treat the leather of my palms like fragile parchment. You are so kind, so gentle and open. And I am withered, tired and sore of spirit. I don't need a warm rain, though warm rains are lovely and smell of wisteria and aged sunlight. I don't need a gentle nudge. And, as lovely as you are, I don't need you.

He is a stormy morning, a thunderous afternoon, and a thousand bolts of lightning dancing across the black evening sky, lighting up the high and rolling fields so that they seem to dance like the hungry tongues of a wildfire. And I may look small in the pools of his eyes, but they are often tired and craving the volume provided by the silhouette of my figure. You stand in need of validation, and you have a love who loves, herself, to connect on levels which I'm not built to access. He stands freely, like a tattered flag bellowing resiliently in the wind. He doesn't hold me tenderly and give me space to crumble as I often feel I will. He resists me in my haste and braces all of my loosened pieces together until they seal themselves against me like a shield. You give me room to be weak and he makes me strong. Every young girl's mother will tell her, "Find a man who loves you for who you are," and you do. But he loves me for everything that I can be.