Fundamentals: Pieces of the Sun

We were eating breakfast at the coffee shop downtown. Maybe it was the coffee or maybe it was the air, but the sunlight was leaving little pieces of itself in her hair.

There are places in this world that happens. It happens in the mountains, and in deserts, too, I've noticed. Sunshine's an animal here. It flows around you, presses your bones and runs liquid through your core.

She didn't know about the sunshine, though I'm sure she could feel it clinging to her. I could feel its maternal motion on my own scalp. Her hair was shot through with colours like legends. It was an entire landscape, that spot above her ear, a steep canyon in New Mexico, where the rock strata, cut through by rivers, glows in the dusk. The mineral sea flashes in undulating ribbons: translucent pink, dappled crimson, claret, auburn, russet, and finally gold.

We sipped coffee and chewed pastries, but my eyes could not leave her hair. When she moved it threw rubies, topaz, diamonds at me. I nodded and talked, my thoughts barely my own. I could feel my heart cracking and those colours pouring into me. At times I had to look away to keep from singing. I don't know what I'd have sung. Instead I laughed to let the beauty escape.

And here's the thing: she isn't what you'd call beautiful. She's a little short and those hairs that were catching fire in the air are shot through with silver. She's got those eye wrinkles that open and close in her animation. That's where more beauty pours out. She was trying to tell me a story about something, but it wasn't her story, it happened to a friend, and she kept losing the thread.

The aspens were waking, shrugging off winter. I could almost hear them starting to breath again. Snow slurried into mud in the streets of our unkempt town. People walked past with dogs on climbing rope leashes, forced into quiet contemplation by the mud on their mountain playgrounds.

I don't know her well, but I was full of her then, that dizzying fullness that won't stop and isn't about desire, because there is more. And then, when it's done, it's done and I can't quite recall what it was that so captivated me.

            And I loved her then, carelessly, with a passion that shifted with the sun's generosity. I loved her in her transfiguration, and even now, when I see her plainness. It's not a love born of desire, but of gratitude, I love her for beauty's sake. I love her not for being beautiful, but for being beauty, and arbitrating it to me.