I did not know that the body created rainbows. Or that only two things could make it happen. Love and anger. The clutch and hold of a lover who squeezes the very breath from you. When you are crushed and pressed like a lily between paper sheets. By arms of tender steel. Hit and kissed, pulled at and bitten, torn from and breathed upon. When you are adored with a desperation that hints at imminent loss. When you are showered with blows that stem from fits of rage or the gentle petals of passion.

Fingers press their way into flesh and leave their marks turning it white with pressure, with passion. Teeth sink and depress themselves onto skin and leave a residue. A copy in white carbon. Marks linger the colours of love. From deep plum to light lavender, bruised purple to sickly grape, from mottled green to jaundice yellow to pink to brown (like onions in a pan) to nothingness but the once-there memory of love.

The body will not lie. Every body has a story. Every body has secrets and some of those are riddled with holes they seep and leak. The body tells its secrets of love and anger. The betrayal shows on skin; the parchment paper, the carbon beneath revealing all detail. Nothing goes unmissed.

The body tells no lies. It is not capable of deceit.

I carried the stain of our lovemaking for sixteen days. On the seventeenth they threatened one last time to leave. I could not stop them or make them stay. It is the eighteenth day and today I am clean as a slate.

My body forgets. My mind remembers.