How do you make memory of what is physically present? How does memory form when the physical form of what is no longer remains?
Every detail that is mine was once yours, too. The shade of brown my skin turns in the sun. Curls that are soft in the front and coarse in the back and wild and black and all over.
You are in the heels of my hands and the swoop in my back and the vein that runs across the arch of my right foot.
You gave me the amber in our eyes.
Legs that walk concrete, searching for earth. Hands that crave touch.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, knee to knee, proportions exact, until you couldn't stand anymore.
.
The great thinkers say that beauty begets. "When the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it." Beauty compels replication.
They say that "beauty is truth, truth beauty," and this is the truest thing I know: I know this is mine, because it was yours first. I know it is beautiful, because you gave it to me.
October 2017