Palpable

Say something pretty...say something pretty about me.

In a dark with grays and light colors, her voice was southern sounding.  Slow, honey over pebbles.
He turned slightly, the stir of sheets ruffling.  He could see her outline, the landscape of her in the darkish almost Kodachrome light...she was present. 

Of course she was. 

Where would I start? he responded, the morning quiet, the day early.  Rain.  Not yet though.

He saw her arms move to cross themselves across her.

Start where I'm not the prettiest.  

He laid back down so that he was flat, staring at the ceiling.  There's parts of you that perhaps I haven't seen.  But even then, maybe I guess I could start with the scars.

Okay.

Because they are the start of healing.  I love them, in that now you are past them.  Yet they are still there.  Alone, I guess I could see where they are a point of...well a point of you where you would cover.  

I do.  Well...I try.

And I love that...I love that I get to see them.  To me, at least...there a bit of a reminder that you can be cut, and maybe healed.  I find a lot of you more than that.

Silence.  A bit of a risk.

She started:  Okay, that's fair.  But let's get to something prettier.

No...let me linger here.  Because this is important...this is why you need to see me the way I see you.

How?

Because you need to see that the starting point of what I find attractive in you, at the very beginning of that attitude...starts with something that you don't like.  We are at opposite ends here.  I think the part of you that may be a little different is exactly why I think you are extraordinarily different.  And it just keeps cascading from there...your hair, your teeth, your eyes...all of those I can compare with everybody else.  But your scars...goddamn, that's you.  

The light outside was widening....the grays moving to a little more white.  The negatives of the photos becoming the Polaroids.

So I could say a bunch of things about the prettiness of you...but I guess the thing that I would leave you with, the thing that I would want you to remember....is this.  I find many things pretty...things at night like colors and skies, the way headlights look across a field when coming towards me...like rivulets of rain on a glass window high above a city.  I think pretty is a word that is only a bit of justice.  When I see you...I don't see a point in time.  I don't see a snapshot.  Yes...yes, of course you're very pretty.  But it's beyond that...it's what you make the day...it's what you make the moment.  You add....you enhance.  You're not just pretty.  But you make the minute with you in it that much more.  Even in the dark.

He heard her breathing...and even in that quiet rhythm he found a glow.