Dear,

I am ink on your skin

I may wash off in the shower

But I am also your lover’s touch

And I don’t think I’ll be washing off any time soon.

She didn’t even bother writing my name. I was swaddled in ruffled sheets when I found this written on my stomach on a bright Sunday morning. The marker wasn’t too far away. This was all I had of her that morning, aside from her shoes.

The note frightened me.

As it should, really. It was too much familiarity after one night. I had just met her, and it didn’t make sense that I wanted to see her again after finding this note. I was frightened and fascinated by the lithe body that was in my bed the night before.

The next time I saw her, I asked her why she had left her shoes. She said she was concentrating too hard on her hands. I didn’t understand. She explained that after waking, her body was floating and that her hands seemed to be the only parts of her body still on this earth. She concentrated hard on using them to dress herself, her body that wasn’t actually there. She said she was clothing an outline of herself. Shoes seemed trivial in protecting her feet from the ground she wasn’t walking on. She was often barefoot when I saw her.

She always said strange things like that. I guess that was where the fascination was. In the aftermath of all the thrashing and panting, I was always secretly waiting for her to speak. And she always did. Saying things that confused me, scared me, and most of all, excited me. I’m not sure what I felt for her, but I know it wasn’t love.

She had thin wrists and straight brown hair that had grown to her shoulders. Her long bangs often covered her muted green eyes. She had these soft, pink porcelain doll lips. In the portrait in my memory, those lips are always brighter than the rest of her face. I never quite understood why.

It took a few days before the note washed off my stomach, but even after, my hand wandered to where she scribbled on my stomach. At work, I would touch my shirt in that spot. Alone in my office, I’d unbutton my shirt, and run my fingers over where her fragile handwriting once lay. She imbued in me such foreign emotions.

A couple months later, I learned that she had a Polaroid of that writing. She said she hated poetry, but that it was the only poetic thing she ever could muster, and that she loved it. It was because it was on my skin. Anything she would have tried to write on cold, unfeeling loose leaf paper would die off before the thought was finished. She left me that Polaroid when I left her. I have seldom looked at it, but often my hands rest faithfully on that spot.

She would always leave in the morning. Always. We saw each other for five months. The relationship reminded me of looking at people through frosted glass. Vague silhouettes of people touching and kissing. There weren’t any outlines.

One morning, I woke up to the water running. I walked into the bathroom, and her tiny desultory form stepped from the shower and wrapped a towel around her body.

It didn’t feel right. I asked her to leave.

She stared at my feet with her wide, mossy eyes. She didn’t ask why. She didn’t say anything at all. We stood there for a long time, she with her hands wringing a corner of the towel she was wearing. There weren’t any tears. There weren’t even any words. Finally, her shoulders drooped and her hands fell to her sides. They were wrinkled and pink and covered with so many little red fibers of terrycloth. Little red fibers that looked like specks of blood. I felt like I had drawn blood.

We said nothing. I left for work. I left her alone in my apartment. I came back that night and there was no trace of her. The towel lay in a heap on the floor with one twisted threadbare corner. The work of her tiny, terrestrial hands.

I sat on the bed for a long time, or at least what felt like a long time. I just felt blank, cold, and unfeeling like the paper she told me I wasn’t. It was so hard to consider possibilities when our strange relationship felt so marginal. She came to me at times that I could barely consider part of my waking life. No parts of us had overlapped, not even our hands.

And it went on like this in my head for a while. I turned it all over and over until what little reason there was dissipated. I began to get up when my hand fell on something smooth. That Polaroid. She always carried a camera. I remembered the other pictures she took: someone’s fingertips, the hair that fell on her shoulders, the corner of her lips. The edges of things. I sat there and looked long and hard at the edge of my body in that darkened photograph. I was sleeping when she took it. I was so vulnerable to her. Maybe that was it. She could’ve done anything she wanted to, but all she did was take a picture.

I don’t know why I felt so bad about someone I never loved. I’ve never felt so responsible for someone’s pain than I did for those next few weeks, like I had taken something from her. But I wasn’t sorry, because I’ve also never felt so changed, so marked by someone before. Four years later and my idle hands still reach for that mark.

Ann Marie Awad is a freshman English and Journalism major and a Literary writer for Generation.