An inch is all it needs... the way you'd train a lion, something wild and large and capable. I can't trust its care to anyone else, am all too aware of what it might do without a strict hand, am the only one hard enough to tame it.

It makes its small escapes, reaching out to copper-colored women in Spanish Harlem and Koreans with twinkly eyes and stories to tell and circling the possibility of the impossibly handsome cosmopolitan male who is just enough out of reach to make it feel safe and that one from many years ago who kissed you in the garden and fingered your hair washed in sunrise. Always moments to be dipped in gold.

Love someone easier, I want to beg. All you will be left with is the kind of memory that makes you wonder if it ever even happened.