Love, Unfolded

Slow motion paced my awakening with her sating my every sense…with the warmth of her naked body contoured around me, the quiet rhythm of sleep’s respirations, the taste of her kiss and sexuality about my lips and mouth, her mix of faint gardenia and lovemaking too elusive for hungrier lungs, but it was just a petite foot that my vision held.

As the sheers filtered first light into the sun’s awakening in our hotel room overlooking the San Antonio River, my focus eased in, defining her toes, my vision inexplicably drawn to something small and delicate and gold atop the dresser a scant meter away.
Karen’s Japanese-Hawaiian grandmother taught her origami, with Grandmother Y’s arms around a little girl eager to transform small squares of paper into wondrous shapes perfecting a hobby passed on from her forebears.

From an expensive pack of origami paper squares I had given her, Karen had secretly quartered the size of a standard sheet and intricately transformed the tiny square into a tiny crane whose gold foil was now glowing in the light of, both, ubiquitous love and early morn.

I was more lucky than happy, loved unconditionally for the first time, affirmed by it’s envelopment without surrender or struggle, a feeling unknown before in more intimacies with wonderful, kind and caring women than any man’s deserved.

Karen’s daughter and job and my own circumstances could work themselves out into that everlasting love one can’t imagine or dream exists, until the next day when, overcome with internal demons and some selfishness, I crushed that love as completely and surely as if I had put a match to the tiny golden crane, origami delicate as her skin, her love, and her heart, breaking that heart and part of my own heart that still yearns for her and another chance at a love that can never take flight.