I Love Everything About You

She was new to the village and when I saw her for the first time, stars appeared, swirling around before me.

Stars.

I grew dizzy and fell to the ground. She came to my aid and from that moment I was besotted. I loved her in all her entirety, from head to toe, and all that was fashioned between.

Her ways dissolved me. There was nothing I could do you see.

*

It was the translucence of her pale skin, which had the ability to refract the daylight in innumerable ways, and appeared always to be naturally and delicately scented with dewberry. It was the dense black hair that closed in around her wonderful oval face like the perfect frame; the soft down on her arms that goose-pimpled at the roots when I first touched her; the crooked smile which formed on her silken lips as she picked up something she had dropped from her elegant fingertips, and she was always dropping things.

It was the way she walked upstairs in front of me, in little stomps which tensed the curved, eclipsed moon of her sculpted calves; how she winced and furled her button nose when unscrewing a bottle cap; the giggles that emanated from her throat when she found every-thing so strangely delightful; the line of her waist and hips which lay curled before me like an art nouveau masterpiece.

It was all these things and so many, many more, I couldn’t begin to tell you.

I marvelled at everything she did, was constantly bewildered by how such peculiar beauty could exist. There was not a thing wrong with her, not that I could see, and I wager that if I had been able to see her intestines, her liver, her lungs and her heart, and if I had possessed the scholarly eye of the surgeon, then I would no doubt have been amazed by their individual quintessence too.

Do not get me wrong as I carry on with all these eulogizing. Though she was perfect to me, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder and you no doubt have your own criteria. She was not by any means the most beautiful girl one might lay eyes upon and for all that she dissolved me, you may perceive a forgettable instance of female mediocrity.

But that was not my experience.

My experience was a love like I had never been party to before in my life. In my eyes — which never ceased seeing stars in everything that passed before them when she was by my side — she could do no wrong.

*

‘You complete me,’ I said as I woke one morning with her soft, spongy buttocks spooned against my adoring tumescence. ‘I really don’t need anything else,’ and I kissed the nape of a neck that was as graceful as the finest Ming vase.

She turned and smiled at me once again with the love I had waited my whole life for, smiting every part of my being.

‘Nor I,’ she cooed, and we kissed vigorously.

The stars became too much and I passed out.

*

It was true though, that as long as I had her I required nothing else. So with that thought in mind, later in the week when she had left the village for a few days to tell faraway friends and family of our love, I determined to get rid of everything, absolutely everything, all our worldly possessions. I wanted to show her how much I loved her, that I had meant what I had said, and what could be a more resolute enactment of my devotion?

We would eat whatever nature provided for us in the fields and forests, sleep under the infinite cloak of the night sky with our smouldering love to keep us warm, bathe in waterfalls and rosewater, and fuck each other inside out, wherever and whenever we so desired.

It took longer than I thought to get rid of our belongings. We had a lot of stuff.

When finally I had removed everything from our dwelling by giving it to the lonely and loveless, the poor and needy, I set about demolishing its stone shell with a sledgehammer until it was mere dust which then blew away in the wind. With nothing remaining apart from the hammer, I tossed it to the bottom of the deepest lake with a joyous cry of liberation.

Word of my activities spread like wildfire. Friends visited, enquired what exactly it was I thought I had done.

‘Begone !’ I said. ‘Begone ! I do not need you !’ And I gestured them away with two hoisted fingers.

My love returned later that day to the place of our previous, superfluous existence.

‘Where is our home?’ she cried. ‘What happened?’

I explained.

*

I explained. Later, I pleaded.

I thought she had felt the same. Had she not agreed with me as we had lain together?

Her words were not true. She did not love me as I loved her. She thought me insane in fact, mad as a balloon. Perhaps I was, but then love can do that to a person.

She left the village and went faraway, and I now sleep alone on the ground where our home once existed, with nothing but memories of her big round eyes, the sweep of her arms, the dimple of her bellybutton, the waggle of her toes and all the other things that made her, her.

As I speak I lie freezing on the ground in the middle of the night, and I no longer see the stars I once saw when she was by my side, not even those purported to be in the sky. Instead I see black holes. I see black holes everywhere I look.

Darkness.

I loved everything about her you see.

*