Man is born crying. When he has had enough, he dies.

"What's it like," she lightly traced her finger down the line of his jawbone, "to live in darkness?"

He shifted slowly and sighed into the tight curl of her ear, his body molding with hers like paint. He knew every line of her body, every slope, from the escalading smooth skin of her thin throat, the sand dunes of her caramel belly, the curved ivory of her hipbones and disc-shaped ilium, the warmth of her thighs, to the shyness of her tiny toes. He knew that by letting his fingers dance on the round bowls of her knees, he would make her giggle and pull her leg away like the graceful ballet of a frightened doe. He knew that he could perfectly bend his fingers over hers and that she arched her dancer's back with quiet pleasure when he pressed on the sore knots of her delicate spine and that her lips were ribbon shaped and her hair softer than the bubbling foam of the receding midnight ocean that hushed him to sleep in his childhood vacation home. She had told him before that it was dark blonde, because calling it dirty blonde made her scrunch her face together like the looming sunflowers that curled at his early home in his memories of color. He knew what sight was. He knew what color was and what the shape of a woman's face looked like, or the red paste of the sun that looked like a cracked egg set on a bowl of navy stars.

It had only been three months that they had known each other, yet he knew her far better by the mere feel of her skin or the sound of her voice. There were the bad things of course; the way she snarled at the people who cut across her in traffic, or the way she snapped her fingers when she was impatient or tapped her toes when she was angry. Whenever the morning train they took together screeched its warning signal as it slid to a stop, she would scream with it, and when he glided his hands down her contorted face, he felt the firmness of the flowery set of her jaw and grimace. She loved to curse. She loved to slam doors to make her point and listen to loud music with deep beats and irritating computerized rhythm. Her humour was crude, and she liked to be bitter.

But the good things always stepped behind like a faithful shadow. Her voice was like the crystal ring of wind chimes when she sang her mother's lullaby in the soft curls of Polish, or when she cried out softly as they made love. Her hands, when she glided them down the firm set of his back, were tender, her lips when she smoothed them over his neck like the tender sighs of bobbing poppies. She held his hand in the movies and screamed even when she wasn't afraid, to show him, she told him, that she was always beside him. She chased pigeons like a little girl and cried when she heard about sick animals or babies and cradled him in her hands like he was her own. Most of all, she loved. He didn't need sight to see that.

"It's colorful." He sighed and she giggled as if she understood and pressed her body closer to his, and held his hand and he bent around her like the ladle of a moon-shaped soup spoon and breathed in the strawberry smell of her sleepy love.