As a boy, I wanted to trace things, anything, out of a deep-seated need to collect. To know. There’s an idea out there that to collect is to own. I like to collect things, but not so as to own them. So that I can know them, more than I already know of them. To love them, at some level. There were the automobiles, the trucks and implements of construction that came first. Then the animals, the cheetah and long-cattails of the stilted creek near my home. The multi-stage rockets, the off-kilter sine wave of space shuttle wing.

The writing came later. A certain kind of trace; not literal, mostly figurative. I learned simile and metaphor, I learned how these things fit together in order to complete some picture of the world, in macro and micro scale. The small shunt of oak leaf capillary. Summer clouds that cotton balls mimic. The idea of the mind and the brain, of two things made whole in one many-organed thing. We, the people, here in this glade, singing songs of praise, to a higher being.

But it was still tracing. It was a methodology to know something better. The details came with mastery, of course. Shading, the way one should hold their hand in order to make the small curves necessary for wings, for the color in a owl’s eye. After a flick of the pencil, a shade of gray added by crayon or marker, and suddenly they were drawings. The depth in the shade of green. Layer upon layer of feathered gray. A pin-stripe running the length of the rearward haunch of a car.

The female form, I never traced or drew. Too complicated. It seemed crass to hone my rough skill upon it, the ideal of it.

So I resort to a trace of a fingertip. I lay here, with you, now, in the old bed, the shade half drawn on a late summer afternoon, and start to trace the idea of you, literal, figurative. I trace you, shade you with rough-hewn skill, rough fingers and a slight tension, in order to know you. To love you, in a small way. I trace the small curve and slight point of your hip. I trace the nape of your neck, trace the line as it falls away from your face and cast of your shoulder, to your elbow, down the length of the outside of your smallest finger. I trace the soft middle of your lower lip, up the length to your cheek, then down the small peak of your nose.

This is how I know you, how I grow to love you a little more.