Unmindful, Unmoved, and Measured...

No, of course I didn't have the heart to wake her! She was too stunning, too magnificent, an effigy almost, as if cut from stone by some chain-smoking Parisian sculptor! Sure, I was already in love with her, yet I never knew the measure of this love until this moment...

She lay there perfectly motionless, save for her chest rising and falling, a single finger flinching, and a few small curls of her light brown hair dancing near her left eye. Couples and children, swimmers, tourists, a man selling snow cones... all of them shifted and whirled around us in splotchy blurred dabs of paint, but she rested unmindful, frozen in the chaos of it.

I leaned in and smiled, reviewing the bridge of her nose and the shape of her eyebrows. She smelled of melting sun oil and shampoo. I wanted to kiss her neck, under her chin so very badly; I wanted to tell her how precisely my stomach sank so very heavily every time I thought of her; I wanted her to see herself how I saw her at that exact sliver in time.

These were seconds that solidified me as a human being, moments that made me understand what absolute, unrestricted affection truly was. Her - HER! - the carved statue deity with painted fingernails unmoved by the great rotations of the earth, unmoved by the sands below her, unaware of her flawlessness! So, while our shoulders and foreheads reddened and while the sun bleached our clothes, that afternoon I came to understand me in that time; I came to know absolute; I came to know the measure of my love for her.