Perhaps better in person?

As an appetizer to dinner at a pancake restaurant, we are playing blacklight mini-golf -- indeed, the mall has something for everyone -- when Amber does a wiggle akin to a vaudevillian showgirl. Standing on the three-inch lip meant to keep our strokes in the bounds of that hole (a lip I ricochet against often, pretending it is a strategy), she leans against her golf club before her, swaying from side to side. It is idle, a fidget between rounds, but floods me with desire for this gorgeous creature feet from me -- her colors all inhuman under these lights, masked, watched over by the five-foot head of an astronaut kitten on the wall.

I whisper a provocative inside joke into her ear, which she, blushing (I assume; these things are hard to know under blacklight), cautions me against voicing. Even if the direct reference might go over her mother's and sister's heads, they who complete our foursome, it would be hard to mistake the sentiment behind the words.

Amber and I see one another daily, sometimes from waking to sleep. We are more familiar with one another than anyone else could be and so, at times, default to a sort of sexless companionability. She sees me muss-haired and sleepy-eyed, grouchy from insomnia or anxiety; she sees me in my totality, but not always at my best. I recollect her purring over the sight of me in formal dress, though I tend to switch into my exercise pants when left alone for too long, intent on exploiting my stepper, exercise bike, or -- weather permitting -- running shoes. Or, if not these, simply more comfortable than slacks or jeans could provide. I am hers, but I am not always handsome. That effort would be unneeded; she would rather have me relaxed, as she intends to be herself in ubiquitous leggings and a billowy t-shirt.

My desire tends to be immediate and physical, offering kisses and embraces acknowledging that I find her alluring. Amber's is slow and subtle. She may say, "My sexy man," in a jokey voice, but it will go no further than words. (This is not to imply that she is not affectionate. She wishes always to be on my left side and cuddled -- if not by me, then the cats.)

I do not in specific know what about me she finds attractive. The minor aspects about her that make me overflow can be strange. (There is a way she smiles with too much teeth, her goofiness when teasing me, how she pulls her shirt over her head when changing as though it were a magic trick, the salty zing of her forehead when she came home from gardening, and others left unmentioned for the sake of narrative decorum.) These are islands in the ocean of our relationship, jutting through with deep roots. I can, it seems, add this to how she dances while waiting for her turn at mini-golf.

When I first began my dalliance with Amber, before I acceded to the inevitability of loving her, I found her odd-looking. Not ugly by any stretch. From the moment I saw her in the flesh, as it were, she compelled my attention without effort. Odd nevertheless, parts that seemed perfect in isolation put together in a suspect way. I took pictures of her early in our entanglement because I knew how important it was to have mementos of our beginning. None came out right, not when she felt the pressure of the camera lens on her. They were her, no doubt. You would look at them and say that it seems like Amber, but they weren't her. They were approximations, what someone who didn't know her would breezily recognize. Then, almost by accident, I took one of her looking bashfully downward. I may have only just flirted with her. It was night, and the flash exposed her pale skin to a glow. That was Amber as she appeared to me then. I wanted to shove that picture at whoever would be fool enough to let me. It isn't easy now for me to say precisely how this picture is different from the pictures I had taken before. I knew that I had had the rare luck of taking a picture of Amber. She was a child model briefly and appeared in the background of a thoroughly forgettable movie titled Niagara, Niagara. The camera does not always love her, no matter how much I do.

She might rattle her flaws on paper. I have no honest clue which one of her legs is supposedly a quarter-inch shorter than the other. Her spine has a scoliotic curve that, in all my fingers' searching, I have never discovered. She has a small dent above one eye from where a dog bit her as a child. She complains of her thighs, but I've never understood her objection (they receive my kisses well). She walks with her feet splayed where most point resolutely forward. If she finds other flaws in her body beyond that she has one, and that secondary sexual characteristics befell it years ago, I don't know them. She has made no mention to me, and I would not have independently noticed.

I cannot find a reason to complain of her mind, though she has come to file its disparate quirks under the broad and welcoming umbrella of mild autism. One cannot tease the craving for schedule and disinclination for loud company from her brilliance and compassion. They are not so much two sides of the same coin as its very metal. Before she was brave enough to overcome her fears of showing me more fully, I adored her mind in an inarticulable way.

A side effect of COVID -- as a pandemic and not any that has infected me -- is that I have had ample time to spend alone with her. It changed the dynamic between us, always being underfoot. I don't run when I return from work. Instead, I exercise at home. After over eight hours away from her, I don't have an urge to add another to the tally. Our lives became more regimented. I plan our dinners two weeks in advance and tend to have them ready as close to 5 pm as possible. I know what my day will look like most of the time, and I do not mind this. I go to bed earlier than I might otherwise, but I sleep better.

We don't generally get on the other's nerves. When I think Amber might be, it could be that I am having mental health issues and have to talk myself through if I am feeling something real or predicated on chemicals out of whack.

Just before I met Amber, my dear recent ex Melanie accused me of having a type, one she assigned me because she defied its categories. To Melanie, in essence, I craved feminine women with overbites. She cited as proof a red hair actress who awkwardly monetizes geek drag -- a woman whom I find cloying but who was alluring for a few months of my relationship with Melanie. Amber fit that description well enough when our relationship began, though she now tends to eschew the overt femininity that marked her outfits at our outset. She sees herself as more androgynous now, not happy with being female, not interested in being male. She refers to herself as "luggage" based on a The Good Place meme. (Janet corrects that she is not a girl, not a person, and not a robot, but smiles when referred to as luggage.)

I have said before, echoing Kurt Vonnegut, that the cause of so much American divorce is that the parties involved are saying, "You are not enough people." We depend on our spouses to be everything for us -- lover, best friend, sex partner, nurse, therapist, travel companion, etc. -- and no one person can be all that for another. Yet, for the most part, I only have Amber these days. When we see friends, I am filled with joy, but I no longer feel starved that I have not been with them; I have little fear of missing out. Amber, in short, is most of the people in my life, piling on a few other jobs in addition to the above -- editor and book designer most flatteringly to me. She doesn't seem to buck under the weight of all this because I do not make them pressure much. I accept the roles she can fill and do not as keenly feel the lack of ones where she is less interested. I don't necessarily see the point in having someone else fill them. I would rather be around Amber and, in a social situation, always feel a bit off when she is absent.

Ten years in and I think every day how fortunate we are not only to have found one another but shaped one another, directly and by example. Without Amber, I would not have sought to go inward and rechristen what held me back as a mental illness over which I could triumph. Before, I thought it was just an inextricable part of my personality. Watching her, loving her, allowed me the confidence to drop arrogance built on insecurity.

last watched: Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story
reading: Gideon the Ninth