Loving Elya

To lie in bed like a great boy squid wrapping my arms around a beautiful girl squid like Elya is like filling the night sky with my face to the edges of the universe. It is like losing myself in cottonwood, dogwood, rainbows, and peacock hats. Elya gives off a womanly heat that makes me forget about rude neighbors or the falling housing market. The kindness of small things fills me like blood, like some warm memory of warm things.

I should like, now, to go upstairs and wake Elya with guitar music, if only I played the guitar. I would sing in Spanish about the beauty of roses and the long ago death of … of a bird, a tiny yellow bird who died hopelessly against the mighty rocks, and how sad it is. I would sing in Spanish, though I don't speak Spanish. The words would come to me easy as sleep from my man-squid soul, the man-squid that Elya has made of me—the song that Elya has made of me, because now I feel like song, whereas before Elya I was old shoes in a closet, I was pants over a chair, I was a man brushing his teeth alone in a mirror before bed.

Once, I wished to be famous, to be known. Now I just wish to know Elya in ever smaller ways. I wish to know things as simple as watering a lawn and remembering to remove the used coffee filter from the coffeemaker because that makes Elya happy. And yesterday I sat with Elya on the steps of our house and held her hand—and it reminded me of all the times I have held her hand, and how the smallness of it seems almost infinite, the softness, the she-ness of it. And how there is no word for “she,” no real word for the she that is “her” and only her, that is Elya