
With my torso folded over my left knee and my right leg stretched out in front of me, I examined a hole in my blue and white striped sock. Pressed against the hardwood floor, I began to paint my pointer finger a dark shade of red. Above me, the golden boy: one hand on the phone, one hand intuitively tugging the length of my hair out from under my sweater collar. Spreading each tendril carefully across my shoulders with the pads of his well manicured fingers, I painted as I felt each coil find its place in the small of my back. I: Still folded, still staring at the hole in my sock, silent. Irrevocably moved by this small gesture. I tilted my chin up and began to fan my wet nails, holding my breath so as not to inhale toxic fumes. With my breath still held, I surrendered to his tattooed thumb pressed lightly into my cheek. Delicately holding my chin for balance, he bent down, nodded “Yes mama” into the phone, and kissed my nose. “She’s the best, she’s doing great.” I assumed; mama wanted to know how I was.
Now squatting at my eye level, we looked at each other while he listened to mama. My eyes moved from the chip in his front tooth, to the soymilk mustache he had grown this week in some boyish tribute to McCartney’s earlier days– The perv-stache didn’t make him any less handsome though I had carefully told him that morning that he needed to shave…– I instinctively reached my non-painted hand into his curls to lightly pinch his ear lobe. We looked at each other for a moment as mama continued to yap about home and how work was.
Using my chin for balance, he stood up and walked to the kitchen. Still on the phone, he came back with what I thought was water, but would soon come to find was instead a glass half full of room temperature tequila. I looked down at my sock, and widened the hole just enough so my toe poked through. He sat himself down cross-legged across from me, hung up the phone, and plunked his glass on the floor next to me. He lifted my non-painted hand and examined it. “You have such pretty fingers!” I laughed, and handed him the bottle of polish and he began to paint my dominant hand. We smiled at each other in the silence of hanging up on mama, and I watched his fingers gingerly paint my tiny nail beds a dark silver. It was funny how much we enjoyed each other, and how I believed it would always be this simple. I could tell it was an accident when he told me loved me that night, and I realized that I had fallen in love with a palindrome. (Most commonly defined as a word that is the same when spelled backwards and forwards, like RACECAR).
What I saw was what I got, and what I wanted was what to expect… Backwards and forwards, it was this simple and true.
And as I peered into the face of my palindrome, who knew me backwards and forwards, who I knew forwards and backwards. I could only hope that the people we loved after each other treated us well. He loved far and wide, and I loved few.

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