Eden

I don’t believe in love at first sight. The first time I saw her I was entirely and helplessly intrigued, and I can’t believe any man feeling more for a woman he’d never met than I did for her in that moment. But it wasn’t love. How can you love someone before you know how they take their coffee or how to make them laugh until they snort? I think love lies in the subtleties of a person. To this day, it is Eden’s subtleties that draw me deeper in love with her.

She washes down pills with gin and tonics. The first time I saw her do this I thought she mistook her drink for water and that she was embarrassed to admit her mistake. But then she did it again. And again. And I realized that this is just something Eden does. She’s that kind of woman, whatever kind of woman that is.

When she’s in public, and it’s that time of the month, she has this way of slipping a tampon up her sleeve before heading to the restroom. It took me a couple of years to catch her at it, she’s that good.

Her favorite color is red, but she says it’s green. I know it’s red because she’s constantly buying things in red: every toothbrush she’s had since I’ve known her has been red; her favorite sneakers are red; her bathrobe; scores of sweaters and shirts and scarves. If you asked her, she’d never admit to having a particular affinity to the color red, but her possessions prove otherwise.

These subtleties, they’re not Eden. She’s far more than the sum of them. But they are glimpses into the core of who she is. And so I notice them, collect them, and hold on to them. I am jealous of them, of my intimate knowledge of them. When I worry that she’ll leave me, what bothers me most is the idea of someone else claiming these subtleties of hers as I do now.

The subtleties make her real. Otherwise I might think her a fantasy. The softness of her hair, her electric touch, the way her laugh warms me… these alone could trick me, make me fancy myself insane. She could be a hallucination, if it weren’t for the rest of it.

But she bites her nails, and her feet are always calloused and shedding flakes of dead skin. When she’s concentrating she makes the most terrible faces, and she can’t sing but she thinks she can. Her palms are consistently sweaty, I hate that god-awful tattoo on her back, and she whines and bitches when she’s sick.

I’ve read some poetry. Guys write about their women, about what it’s like to hold them in their arms. They use phrases like “her fairy-like form” and “soft like the petal of a rose”. But Eden isn’t anything like that. When I hold her I don’t think about fairies or flowers. I think about the fuzz on the back of her neck and the hardness of her shoulder blades against my chest. I breathe in her scent, and it’s more musky than flowery. She seems to me not frail and delicate in my arms, but strong and substantial. She epitomizes reality when she’s in my arms; there is nothing fantastical about her. Eden is strikingly real, and this is what I love about her.