Love the colour of caramel

The man I love, sitting on the sofa to my left, sipping coffee, reading the Times or the Wall Street Journal, gives me only the headlines worth a laugh or an eyeroll. He handles all the plants here. Seven cacti nestled into one corner, two nearly touching the ceiling, the other five resting at scattered heights, all cut from the same mother plant which sits at the edge of the darkened room behind us amidst a few others — I cannot remember how many — but one is so tall it left a dent in the ceiling when he moved it there. There are more than the ten or eleven tall, slender cacti; plants grace every surface and hang from the ceilings.

His blue eyes are piercing. Sometimes a clear ocean. Sometimes deep, stormy grey blue. Rapt. Full of attention. Misty. He cradles a laptop in the nook of his lap, 45° folded, reads something ridiculous about AI and threats to life from the WSJ (which he likes for the global flows); Marcel the cat rests across his knees; I write, first time on paper all week, sideways, in a journal that has rested on my bookshelf for a decade and a half, waiting to be chosen. Leatherbound, sewn in bundles of paper, permanence, slender leather strap to wrap the pages, to hold them closely. Leather the same caramel as the coffee table and my pen and the coffee he poured me with “browning agent,” a phrase that never fails to elicit a laugh.

I sit beneath the coffee table cross legged on a floor he laid down and will tear up because the colour is not quite right. The right colour is caramel leather and milky coffee from the pour over makeshift thing that is more delicious than what I’ve been brewing in the french press for all these years since the Chemex became too dirty. Too difficult to clean. Too strange a shape to get the sponge inside, maybe. At least that’s the story. It doesn’t matter though. This coffee is warm and my love is warm and my man says, well, I’d think you should write about being in love — that was last night — and I remember I have been annoyed with the intellectualized, empiricized “love stories” with the perfect details and predictabilities and laziness and now, I’m writing about being in love and it’s all milky coffee and coffee tables and newspapers and I used to think it would be intensity like the house that burned down in my court 50 yards away, but it is different. Intensity without the tumultuous desperation built on a longing without promise, or even whisper of touching. Intensity rippling — a slow build of waves rising from tectonic shifts. A friction of gentle depths and sand rustled loose by a billowing jellyfish and a series of knowing winks and a sense of certainty; the cat purring in your lap, nestling between the two of you in early morning sunlight. I say early, but I don’t know what time it is, only that he notes the position of the sun and says, “seems like a good time to have some coffee,” before kissing you, telling you you’re beautiful, recalling the pages of the novel, Housekeeping, he read to you last night, lulling you to sleep for 45 minutes before being overcome with a desire to kiss your lips and place a soft, yet firm hand over your womb, which he will often smile into and imagine filling with a child. He will imagine you as a mother, relenting to your hunger — there is something about beauty and feeding you which you love and are afraid of — and you will feel all of this as he fucks you and looks into your eyes with his deep misty blues, and tells you you are beautiful and he loves you now and would have loved you in your darkest, most desperate moments.

He tells you five things. Except for the first, you do not remember what they are… only that you accepted, said, yes, I do, over and over, the whole time imagining your wedding. Waves of fuck rippling through your body, he is cradling you, telling you he is mesmerised, you remember he spells colour with the ‘u,’ just as you do.

You realize you did not know what love was, nor belief, nor trust, until you loved him.

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