She's porcelain. Her skin is glass and white and cold, and the apples of her cheeks are stained by roses. Her lashes are feathers, painted black, fanning royal emerald eyes. Her lips a glossed-on burgundy. They're plump, bitten, swollen. He wants to kiss them and pull his name from her mouth, pepper the letters across her jaw, on the tip of her nose, her eyelids, behind her ears. To run his skeleton fingers through her strawberry waves, cradle her skull, to look at her. Really look at her. He wants to sink into her pupils and drown in every honey-sweet word she says. For her silkworm voice to spin in his ears, thread through his brain, take over him. Because she is all you can love about the universe. Her beauty mimics Irish fields, New York lights, Caribbean waters. Her genius is never ending. It's overflowing, deep and dangerous like the ocean. She is Shining Orion, setting suns, her own City of Love. He wonders how no one else sees that she's everything.
And he adores her.
She's porcelain. Her vibrance is dulled, her shell cracked, her skin worn and spotted. Her eyes a sweet, hardened glaze. Her lips are an aging canvas, chapped and beige and scarred from worrying them. He wants to press his paintbrush mouth to hers and make it art again. Lean their heads together and breathe. Watch her button nose flare, expel his oxygen. Rest. He wants her words to steady, stop shaking and breaking and fading. She's not a scratched vinyl. She's not a broken violin. She has a voice. And he doesn't want her to lose it. She always knows what to say. She's eternally right. Because she's filled to the brim with the universe. She's shattered shells on the beach and an overcast sky. She's soundless church bells and blistering hot tea. She's a lone headstone, not Ohlsdorf cemetery. And he knows she's not everything. Really just blood and bones and muscle and soul in the end.
And he loves her.