I began to paint as I began to know her, a physical embodiment of the history of that unfolding and fragmented, each in different boxes. I painted as if falling in love could be documented and resigned into something as solid as images, which did not move, which could not morph as she morphed in every movement.

I painted her eyes first, her demon gypsy eyes, surrounded by fog, for all else was obscured in her presence. I painted her eyebrows next, thick and dark and yet gentle. They reminded me of water. I painted her hair, fine strands falling along the sides of her face and down her back, falling into waves at the bottom.

I painted her hands. They were weathered yet still supple. They were not naive but yet they did not resist. I let myself be deceived so as to not be on guard against deceivors. They understood, and understood what they did not understand, and still looked out at the world with wonder. I painted her fingers, which were long and liked to touch and trace things absent mindedly. I painted them as they moved up and down my arms, her nails lightly scratching my skin.

I painted her lips, which were so careful, so delicate, that they at once seemed like the most innocent and the most sexual thing that I have ever known, as vulnerable as the genitals of a child. I painted them kissing my own, I painted her breath speaking to me, I painted her trembling and I painted her sighs.

I painted the roadmap of her veins on top of her own body, blood flowing like secrets in tiny boxes which move between each other and bump against everything in their way, afraid to be realized in the harshness of oxygen which turns them blue and changes their content.

I painted pieces of her flesh within her bones, I painted her inside out as she began to reach inside me. I painted each painting again and again, over each other as they changed with her own body, a room full of drawers that change shape when I blink. I painted the imprints she had left on my skin. I realized at some point that I had to begin painting self portraits and she entered and transformed even me, the shadows and consequences of who she was and is.

I left canvases blank for her everywhere, for what she would or could be, because I knew that the only way that I could ever love her was by non-possession and possibly by metaphor.