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You asked me to write something for you. How do you say anything to someone who robs you of breath and of speech?

There are no words yet to describe you. All of the words in all of the books in all of the languages of the world hold no perfect weight. When I am with you, something inside me grows quiet and listens for your own soul’s hush. I can feel the faint buzz of human electricity circuiting through the air when we lay perfectly still. When we stare into the sky on clear or cloudy nights, I can almost hear the hum of your heart. I think the constellations hide behind the clouds because they want the people who truly yearn to see them seek them out.

When you look at me, I know that you see me. It’s terrifying, to be so exposed simply by holding a glance for a fraction of a second longer than we are used to. I do not know what you see when you look that way, and I think I’ll never know.

When I look at you, I like to take a moment to see you. And I love what I see. It’s a beauty I’ve always dreamed of but never expected to find. It is a canvas of peeling paint. So many coats the canvas sags on its wooden frame and the layers peel back to reveal colors that are only imagined outside of you. You have colored my world with pigments that exist only in your soul. I try to be gentle and peel away the thick slabs of paint, each layer more complicated and dimensional and beautiful than the last. When I think I’ve scattered the last of them onto the black and white of my world, I find new chipped layers beneath my fingernails. And certain flecks of my gray and white match the colors of you. I see you now. And when I see you, I realize you’re seeing me, peeling back my paint, coloring your world with my shades, and my terror is palpable. Never has such tenderness touched my skin, slowly shedding my layers of painted-on until my soul is naked in front of you and I stand pale in a world of the brightest browns—the muddling of our colors. I see you seeing me and I have to close my eyes for fear of falling in love with the portrait we’ve painted

and as my fear multiplies, I am coloring my soul again, scribbling furious red and aquas and ebonies. And as soon as I finish, you peel it away with such grace and I realize you have always seen me.

And I realize there is no point in tattooing myself in crimson and yellow, because you’ll simply take the murals I paint and break them apart and show me how to build without fear. We are building a city of broken bits and we are finding wholeness in each other.

When I see the constellations between phases of clouds, I hope that whoever is seeking them sees them, too, because no better feeling exists than seeing things you’ve always hoped to see the instant you planned on turning away.