Love,

I watch you sleep. You know this. One day perhaps we will joke about how my eyes are loud enough to wake you. But in all truth, I watch you sleep because my exhaustion is no excuse to lose this moment. Yes, this one. Right now.

Even in your placid state, I imagine your eyes flutter in deep sleep, every now and then halfway opening because you see something more than I can understand.

When you are awake, you sometimes speak quietly, slowly, and with thoughtfulness. But even when you are silent, I can feel you – clear across stadium rooms in the dead silent of a sleepy night and early morning. There is something magical about you that is not a trick, but simply because it is not a trick I am apprehensive because nobody, nobody has this kind of power.

And then the sun rises, and you are laying next to me. Hours have passed since our last words. I catch you opening your eyes and all I can do is exhale. And then, more than anything else, you are there. You are here. Hello, you always say. Simply. Unobtrusively. As though there were nothing simpler.

Your eyes are green. No, brown. Both? But sometimes I mistake your kind of color for that composite of every color this universe has ever produced. Sometimes, in my delirium, I forget your name. Sometimes I forget the colour of your eyes. But that is understandable now, especially after my gaze strayed accidentally and lingered deliberately on the not-so-innocent strings of the thong that held your modesty intact only last afternoon.

Cosmologists have overlooked galaxies pondering the patterns in the mole-colored specks of life across your back. Believe me, I know: Your eyes are merry kindness, mysterious sadness,  and a pattern of adoration spelled out in hieroglyphs I have never learned how to read. Your eyes are joy. Your mouth breaking indecisively and then completely into a crescent moon of a smile, is joy. Your fingers reaching for mine in the dead of night, is joy. Your half-dreamed, half-said “I love you” in your sleep, is joy.

Some wake at dawn to answer the muezzin’s call. I stay in bed and respond to your letters with my fingers stenciling your skin.
Some people go to church, I stay home and believe in you.
Some read scriptures and recite verses. I clean my tongue with the rosary of your name.