Archetype

When I was 7, I decided I was going to marry a man with black hair and green eyes. His name would be Edward, and he would love me more than anyone else in the whole wide world.

Now, a childhood and the first shaking steps of adulthood later, aged 18, I lay awake at four in the morning, feeling the warmth of your smooth ochre skin and silk thread hair, streaked lightly with grey. It's dark and the light from the balcony illuminates you in a weary monochrome, sending shadows streaming from the branches outside onto your sleeping face. I had never known it possible for a man to be so beautiful, so unutterably perfect that my chest swells to bursting knowing that I love you. I lean closer, allowing my hand to trace the cool line of your brow.

You don't stir, your lids heavy with the exhaustion of making love to me. Every muscle in my body wants to pull you to me and wrap you in my arms so closely you wake to my touch, but I dare not rouse you so late at night. I feel tears in my eyes at the thought of you. What had I done to deserve a man who loves me so much? Who cradles me like an infant when I breakdown, who teaches and shows me the world through eyes so much brighter than my own? You restored my faith in men, the upstanding goodness in humanity, the vulnerable beauty of the smallest of things.

In the morning you will mutter in a newborn manner, and reach for me across the sea of sheets with two long, ape like arms, longing to be held, and I will hold you as you hold me. I love the smallness of your hands, the neatness of each fingernail, the crease of your beautiful eyes as you wince at waking. You call me dear, or beautiful, as if it was as much my name as my birth certificate. Every time you do I feel my soul curl like a leaf in the blessing of light, and I reach for you, full point, to kiss the lips that spoke to me.

You are a secretive man with no secrets. I know everything and nothing and sometimes I wonder why. I have seen you fall to the ground, broken, and weep in my arms with all the sorrow of the world. I have seen you laugh so hard you are reduced to gasping and coughing, so much so I am concerned. I have seen the best and worst sulks and tantrums echo from your being, met with both my hidden smile and anger.

But to any other man who walks this earth you are mellow in your emotions, ever calm, ever stable. You do your best but I see the shadow shows; the man holding onto the only way he knows to row through his fears and sadness. Your formality in your high soft voice breaks my heart on hearing you. I cannot fight your battles or draw a sword on your behalf, but my arms are open, outstretched, always, and I will be the walls to the storm and keep you safe and strong. You are, behind your fifty years, still a child searching for answers in a sea of books and being.

I don't mind. That's the wrong phrase. I don't mind because I love it, all of you, cantankerous, out of touch, snobbish and cold, because I know it is you behind your long hours and cruel bosses, it is you who will kiss me and hold me with the sweetness and love no one has ever come close to. It is you who will sit through my rages and tears and insecurities with the patience of saints and the wisdom of ages. We are not children, nor adults when we hold each other, just two frightened humans in a beautiful, wicked world. And I will love you, my dear, dear man, until the end of my being.

Outside, the world may demand the savage hatred of men for their brothers, bay like famished wolves for the blood of the followers of gods, but for now I hold you, and you hold me, in this great sinking ship at the breaking wave of a cold war. I will not hear the anger of the innocent dead, nor search in my fists for the cruelty to hit those who seek my fear; we are stronger than the bitterness of bullets or the sharpness of swords, we need no heads to stand tall knowing we are pure of all sins cast on us for our love, we need no limbs nor strength to be stronger than this viciousness, this age of terror, this aggression of the unnamed, the unloved, the unwanted.

I will draw no pistols and kill no man, for while their hatred may kill a thousand, love shall bear a million more, who will bring with them a brighter dawn. I hold you now. I will hold you then. I am yours, you are mine, one soul bound by the beauty of humanity.

Your name isn't Edward. But yours is close enough for me.