Sketch

If I were an artist, I would sketch you in a near-infinity of nudes. Not because of the magic of your flesh, or the grace in your bones, or the way your eyes sit so naively in your perfect face, but because of the way your body moves. So much power in the slightest unfolding. So many secrets in the lines of your skin.

Sketch 1 would be you in repose, one leg stretched out, the other slightly bent, your head on a rolled-up pillow. It’s the only time I’ve seen your face look so unguarded. As if your mind had unclenched, and your anxieties had been made to dissipate through your pores.

Sketch 32174 would be you asleep. Because when you’re asleep you hold me as if I hold your world in my hands.

Sketch 970175 would be you sipping coffee, legs propped up on that patterned ottoman I’ve always thought of buying.  I like the width and breadth of you this way most of all. Grave, but in pleasure. Serious, but unfettered. You only ever seem to find optimism just after dawn.

The last piece I’d save for a dreamscape in my mind.  I’d give you wings. I’d clear the darkness from your eyes. I’d unstain your soul.

Sometimes I still think of you in stills, like a stop-motion film, and under my gaze, your life is pieced together sketch by sketch, frame by frame. And then I remember that I’ve turned away from you years ago, and the nudes of you lie hidden in someone else’s head, and the poses of you must be sketched by someone else’s pen.

I envy her sometimes. I envy her all the iterations of you she is yet to learn to draw.

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Martina Young is a freelance writer with roots in both America and the Far East. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.