How difficult revelation when one must choose between telling facts and telling truths. His body was lean and white as stripped beechwood, and his black hair smelled like the sea. Still, I fear that when I tell him about others his eyes might at some point darken with hurt. I will stand before him and he will pass judgement on my life as some calculated traffic in hearts, faithless and impure. About impurity he may be right.
Nothing is that clean.
I look down at his loved body, the gold and white of him that shakes my heart, and know that every kiss is somewhat of a leaving, every fidelity between us something of a lie. And yet we caress and promise and unveil our coded honesties, our complicated truths. I knew a man once, a psychologist whose specialty was helping trauma patients recover from disfiguring wounds. He spoke to me of a client he had had, a dancer whose face had been crushed when her sportscar tripped an embankment, throwing her into the freeway guardrail. It had taken thirty hours altogether to reconstruct the glass-like bones of her face from sections of her ribs.