(009)

But physics could never explain the ways he loved her; how he loved to be with her more than anything he’d ever known. He loved the sight of her freckles and the constellations they made over her skin, the taste of her lips as he lay between her legs. He loved the underside of her tongue, blue and red and purple and how it never stopped moving. She moved him. He loved the tiny hairs on her cheeks, the scrape of her nails against his back, the heat of her skin. He knew that science would never open its eyes to find its face against her neck, never feel the heartbeat that lay under her skin, sometimes uneven, sometimes as sturdy as the ocean. There were some things that men could not make a study of like he. He became the faithful student; the dedicated cartographer; the avid explorer, mapping the contours of her body, the sweet valleys and the cool mountaintops. He became a servant to her heartbeat, teaching and commanding him how to breathe once more. She needed him as much as he needed her, and she was his to study, his to turn into science, to break apart. His hands dissected her into organs that knew his name, the touch of his hands on the skin encasing them would cause them to swell, to squirm and to move. His lips made organs once more into cells, in which the nucleus held all she really was, the DNA and commands that said live and die. Science pulled carbon from hydrogen and oxygen, broke particle from particle until all that was left was the beginning of the universe: nothing. For without her all had ceased to be, and all life, all science and research had no meaning, none other that she was the one that held the universe together, and he with it.