Without Music

This young man balances on his elbows above her, keeping watch of her eyes. Look at me, Look at me, he has said.

What does he see? Does he notice the scars around her nipples, happy results of false alarms? Or the white one crawling across her belly, cut when a child chose a different path into the world? His scars are chosen—a rough scribble imprinted in blue ink for an almost forgotten Rhonda, a heart balancing beneath Japanese words that need translation, a cross with magic jumping off his always tanned, veined, muscled arm.

Does he see the invisible scars she carries, she wonders, as well as those on her face, neck, décolleté, despite creams and massages? His are hidden behind the façade, he has called it, of lithe dancing, Latin rotations to incessant rhythms that beat from the center of his world, with or even without music.

One half her age. She doesn’t need her fingers to count or Oedipus to whisper or the Fates to foretell the beginning, middle, or end of this interlude. Her word.

Look at me. His words.

One half her age and a lifetime apart, along with the future and all those losses, hers accumulated with the years, his insisted on at birth. What does he see, she thinks, one last time. Before she draws him in, and drinks deeply of hope.