Adoration; an idea.

He had infiltrated, dissolved into her pores. The heat between their bodies lingered like a residue of memory, haloing her silhouette with the desire of what she couldn’t have.

He had lines of a Grecian statue and eyes made of the painful blue truths of the universe. His fingertips were youth incarnate. His torso, the athletic hinge from which all his strength surged.

He was a figure of design so sophisticated that time could not tarnish it.

She considered Fate a merciful planner. They had met in the twilight of his prime and the crescendo of hers. To meet him any earlier would have meant a quicker death, as the fragile tapestry of the shore cannot withstand the thrashing of the tide. The blatant vitality of his younger years consumed everything it touched and in early development her perceptions lacked their current precision. Between these two facts of time past—the force of his intellectual and physical charms and the naiveté of her intuition and romanticism—he would have flooded all her resolve, like the sun blotting out the retinas of the fool who stares at it directly. Fate had been kind by orchestrating their meeting after experience had granted her steelier wits and had tempered his attractiveness into something less intimidating.

Hours, decades, infinity.  

She wanted to savor the soft fur of his belly, careening her lips and nostrils over him, satiating taste and smell in one long, winding gesture. His body made her vividly aware of an ideal she harbored at the core of her identity: adoration. She craved to smolder feelings through her caresses, transcribe longing in laps of her tongue, probe the poles of his body until she had understood and blessed all the subtleties of its landscape. She sought this for adoration—the ideal of loving so completely the self becomes secondary, drowned in the celebration of an external. To adore him like no one else could, she awoke the heroine inside herself.

It was in this waking that she saw more clearly, the world was a flux of ideas, the most unblemished of such were ideals worth fighting and dying for.

Entombed inside the ideal of adoration, lay the ideal of perpetual defense. The adage that one is “a lover and not a fighter” is not true: to love something is to fight for something.  To adore something so purely one must be willing to combat for its significance and survival; to adore an idea so thoroughly, belief in its existences means being incapable of ever turning away from it. The catholic martyrs throughout the ages, dying in adoration of their Christ, intimately knew this dichotomy of adoration and defense.  In the core of such dedication is the spirit of a fighter unwilling to relent on her belief in an idea; an adoration so steady and focused that dying in the name of this dedication is the only option. To do anything else would mean having to release this adoration into the atmosphere, let it diffuse and lose it power. Adoring is equally an act of aggression as much as an act of romance; it forcefully creates meaning in an otherwise lax and meaningless world. To harbor adoration for anything or anyone creates the deepest groove of significance, a depth so profound one is willing to defend the adored to one’s death.

That was how she felt when she thought of him. She adored the expansive quality of their relationship, the sprawling freedom they allowed each other in their movements and commitments. He injected his stylized capriciousness into their connection and the intoxicating swirls of its uncertainty demanded independence and receptivity. She adored what he was to her—stripped of gender, status, age, cultural conventions—he was a human and a god, a precocious boy and a seasoned man, an unrepentant warrior and a compassionate forgiver. In his skin, lay the entire spectrum of human possibility; in his heart, the culmination of emotions for epic tragedies and comedies alike.

She could see this in him from the initial moments of their introductions. This foresight sent her down the path of adoration, and with each successive step the impetus to defend him swelled. The adoration that latched onto him upheaved her heroine in all its irrational grandeur. He was a kaleidoscope of wonder and idealism, a prism of never-ending potential, and she could not being fatally inspired and vowing to safeguard him eternally.