ELIANA
af·fi·nage: /?afi'näZH/: noun
1: French for “to refine”; the art of aging cheese.
2: a steady transformation into something beautiful.
The first few days after the park, I wait for the other shoe to drop. Any minute now, the man in the black sedan will return. As soon as I blink, Bastian will pull away again. The spell will break. The fear will become unmanageable.
But none of that happens.
Instead, something stranger occurs: I fall in love.
I watch it happen the way you might watch someone walk into traffic: with a kind of detached horror, a certainty of the outcome, and the bizarrely contented feeling that comes from knowing you could stop it but won’t.
It’s peaceful, this sense of letting go. Days pass easily because I’ve stopped clinging onto them as hard as I can. I’m finding better uses for my hands, anyway.
I’m learning toseewith them. The ridge of Bastian’s collarbone, the hollow of his throat. The jump of his pulse beneath my fingertips when I touch himthere,likethat.I am memorizing him in Braille, in heartbeats, in a language of the body that doesn’t require light.
Which is not to say that I’m not still using my eyes. Even as the tunnel of my vision narrows and narrows, I’m learning just how much there is to see in this world.
Bastian takes me to the Art Institute one afternoon. It’s the middle of a workday, but he tells Patricia to clear his schedule and we go to the museum. While we’re there, I make him play a game with me: I close my eyes and he has to describe each painting in my ear. It’s maybe the most sensual thing we’ve done yet.
His lips, soft and full. His exhales tickling the nape of my neck as he murmurs. His patience most of all. No detail neglected, no brushstroke left behind.
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatteis my favorite. I stand with my eyes closed with my back pressed against Bastian’s chest. His arms bracket me loosely on either side, hands resting on the railing. “It’s all dots,” he says against my ear. “Thousands of tiny points of color. Red and blue and yellow scattered everywhere. Up close, it’s almost incomprehensible. But step back, and suddenly, it’s a park on a summer afternoon.”
I feel his chest expand against my shoulder blades as he inhales.
“There’s a woman with a parasol in the foreground,” he continues. “A little girl in white is holding her hand. They’re both facing away from us, looking at the river. Other people arescattered across the grass. Some are sitting, some standing. A man plays a trumpet. A couple dances to the music. Dogs roam. A world of people sitting happily in the sunshine.”
I like this thing, him narrating the world. As long as I have his voice in my ear, it’s so much easier to relax into the darkness.
So I make him keep doing it. When he takes me for ice cream after the museum, I make him try my flavor first and describe it to me. When we go to dinner the next weekend at a new Ethiopian place in Pilsen, I make him describe every dish before I taste it. The way the injera feels spongy against his fingers. How the berbere spice builds slowly, a creeping heat that sneaks up on you. The earthiness of the lentils. Collard green brightness.
“You’re turning me into a thesaurus,” he complains, but he’s mostly joking. He likes this game as much as I do.
At night, when we’re tangled together in his bed, I make him describe what he sees when he looks at me.
“Your eyes are hazel,” he says without hesitation, “but they shift. Sometimes green, sometimes brown, depending on the light. Or your mood.”
“What else?”
“Freckles,” he murmurs. “Everywhere. Like someone spilled cinnamon all over you.”
And on and on from there. I stop counting down the days and start counting the moments. Like little dots of color in my life. Even the black ones, the bad ones, fill a space and form a picture, so I’m grateful for them, too.
March 19: He teaches me to poach an egg.
March 29: I can no longer see the color red in low light.
April 4: Bastian whispers my name in his sleep.
April 11: I lose my peripheral vision completely. The world becomes a pinhole camera, and I have to turn my head constantly to see anything. Bastian buys me a ridiculous wide-brimmed sun hat that makes me look like I’m about to board a yacht, but it helps. The brim gives me something to orient myself by when everything else narrows to a tunnel.
April 22: I can’t decipher street signs anymore unless I’m standing directly underneath them.
April 23: He reads to me. We’re lying in his bed, my head on his chest, and he picks up a cookbook from his nightstand. Not a recipe, just the introduction, some French chef waxing poetic about the art of aging cheese. His voice rumbles through his ribcage into my ear.
