For many years, I did not go looking for him.

I sat on my hands. I did not take pictures, or sketch trees or write poems. I let it go, the driving urge to be seen. To command. To insist on my own fierce existence.

I felt him in this world with me but I thought he would be better off. Would find love in the arms of some other more deserving girl. Would claim a new home, a new life.

I did not see. Not for years.

Without me next to him, no one was next to him. Without me to be his witness, no one stepped forward. No one had my eyes to see. The women who loved him in my place, they could not hold him. They could not make him less alone.

I want someone who will love me in any clothes I choose to wear, I said. I want someone who will know that our bodies are only clothes we wear.

I loved him because it was him. I thought he was hot and hottest and what do I care what hotness is or looks like, anyway? America has spent 30 years teaching me to love men who look like monsters and teaching me he is not hot because he is not a monster. America tried to teach me to desire to be consumed instead of to desire to be loved. It didn’t take.

I am writing the shades of the inside of my desire. All the days of my life, they rushed right through me and I waited and waited to die. He was a vision of a crystal fountain. He is the place where hunger becomes holy. I wanted to curl up next to him to learn how to be someone who is not afraid of how beautiful the music is.