Riverbanks

To my husband on our wedding anniversary...

I have a problem with words. They get stuck in my throat, their sharp edges painful, lodged so tight it's hard to swallow. I want to say the things I'm thinking, feeling, but I can't seem to open my mouth wide enough. Perhaps my fear is that, once released, there will be nothing to contain them. They can float around, too free, and then disappear into nothing, unheard.

Words on a page flow freely when they have the benefit of straight lines and clear boundaries. This page is a riverbank, letting my feelings flow and keeping my words still long enough for you to take them in. I like when I can see the borders, know their shape and texture, exactly where they end and I begin. If you're smiling—I know you are—thinking that the safety of a boundary is just an illusion, then just keep smiling, and let me have my dream.

Because that is what you do for me. You are my boundary, my protection, the edges I press up against. I never locked my doors before you came, and now you check them every night before we go to bed. My heart still melts at that gesture as I snuggle down under the covers and wait for you to check the perimeter, knowing you will make sure all is well before you join me.

When I press up against the wall of your back, solid and strong, and kiss you between your shoulder blades, I can lose myself in the immense, broad scope of your flesh. My hands want to trace every rising slope, the hard ridges of muscle that flex, sometimes even in your sleep.

My softness is my gift to you, the rub of my thigh over yours, my velvet belly and the gentle swell of my naked breasts as I flatten myself against you, searching for that threshold, feeling the resistance of that solid wall of muscle as I try to find a way to melt into your body.

I know that I can completely let go with you, that everything I have kept tightly reined in can be let loose. There is no wildness, no crazy, twisted part of me that you won't accept, that you can't contain. I am more free within your borders than I have ever been, and I like to push them, test them, rub my bottom up against them and feel you tremble with the effort to stand.

But you always do. The way your cock stands up for me to dance around, to take into me and ride until I'm breathless, grinding my pelvis into yours until I know we'll both be bruised tomorrow. And still you hold me, your hands trying to contain the flow of my body, your fingers kneading my flesh, as I rock like a wave in the cradle of your hips.

You let me crash against your shore, again and again, rolling with that sweet rhythmic music of our love, the love of the world—we are love, limitless, stretching, an endless push and pull. Your steady heart, big and strong and pounding blood red with life, beats against mine as I try to push into, past, through, feeling for those limits, blurring the boundaries between our flesh.

You are a rock, granite, fiercely constant, and I can flow over and around you like the steady, pulsing rhythm of our life, seeping honeyed sweetness. The making of our love is an undoing, an unfolding, a gift we are opening to every moment, every day. Your hands steady me, guide and direct me, here and always, showing me the way, places I didn't know existed and couldn't have found on my own.

I have felt no other connection like this, when we come together, the slick, slippery heat of our flesh meeting and melding at our center. I quiver under your hands and the weight of your body as you fill me, that one moment frozen like perfection, spilling love into the world like a flood.

If there is another man like you, I don't know him—and I don't care. You are the magnificent man in my life, the one heart that reaches into mine, who cradles the vulnerable softness of my belly in his hand when it trembles. I know am blessed every night, when your warm breath moves over my neck like a prayer.

You have made me a very lucky woman, and my heart's gratitude beats only for you. I could never open my mouth and speak a tenth of what I feel, and my eyes can only give you half. Perhaps my words flowing freely within the boundary of this page will show you a glimpse of what burns in my heart.