Braille
by Adrian
My fetish is blind women, particularly the ones sightless from birth;
the reality in their hands is
literal, all glintless edge and surface,
a myriad of texture, all uneven. The girl of my dreams goes through
life
with hands outstretched before her, trying to fit the world in her
palms.
She knows how to reach into the dark, unquestioningly; a surface will
be in touch very shortly. All contact in her periphery, every other
voice
a faceless vibration, an echo.
I like the image of the damaged picture mechanism
in her mind's eye, and me being
its repairman. I’d retool her with
stories
of what she cannot see. Like
what stars are or what they could never be.
Dates will be by the bay, at the foot of an ocean, we'd talk about
water
for hours and what she'd think
and what I’d mean would be impossibly
the same. When it is quiet around us I will whisper in
her ear the love
story of the dark, Cupid and
Psyche: because Psyche rivals Venus in beauty,
Venus sends Cupid, her son, a poisonous beautiful angel winged
monster,
to induce Psyche to love the worse man possible. But as he aims at her,
he mistakenly pricks himself with one of his own arrows, dooming him
for her.
Arrangements are made and they marry, with a condition: Cupid beds
Psyche
only at night, with a necessary darkness. Psyche, told of her husband as
indeed
a monster, prepares a lamp and
a dagger beneath her pillow and when Cupid is asleep
beside her, she unsheathes her
weapons but finds too beautiful a husband. Cupid wakes
and finds her and realizes the
betrayal. He curses Psyche and leaves her forever;
Psyche wanders the earth, mourning her invisible loss. I lie about the
ending but
she will not notice. Then, when
she assents, I will take her to a room I
had built,
a high ceilinged windowless
room, unfurnished, not even a bed. Inside,
every gesture resounds. And I
tell her this is like the story but I am Psyche
and you will be Cupid and I want you to run your hands through me
and read me and I want you to tell me I am beautiful and I take her
hands
in mine and whisper, if you could, please. And in the necessary
darkness
I unsheathe and show her my mask, my still blind-fold face, and the
letters
on my skin rise and illuminate the most painstaking of
confessions.