skin

She had never noticed the freckle above her lover's navel. Not until that afternoon, as he lay on the bed with his shirt pulled up, humidity-sweat dried by the fan's weak breeze. How had she never noticed? Maybe she had and forgot, and she wondered what else she had forgotten, what peculiarities of other lovers' bodies.

She wondered if mothers forgot or if they memorized every inch of their babies' clean, unbroken planes of skin and remembered them always. How would it be to be a mother and see a beloved child's skin pierced, reddened, by jewelry? Or inked by tattoos or broken by misfortune? How would it be to rush a child's compound fracture to the hospital, seeing the bright white bone no one was ever meant to see, laid out like a myth, an excavation, to be studied and reburied changed, documented, no longer a secret.

What would it be like to give a child up, to let it grow up and go away to a lover who would know the adult body better than a mother ever could?

And why didn't she treasure his body, the skin that she alone viewed, she and he together and separately and daily? How could she not notice, but then how could she? It was impossible to live on the plane of the first flush of love, when lovers sat at each other's tables and devoured the details of each other. After that first feast, they took the crumbs of details as they came: summer hair brightened by sunlight, knees that ached in movie theaters, skin pulled tight over shoulder bones. And these things changed and changed and changed.

She had overlooked the freckle before, but at least she knew now.