Nijntje

Did I say you looked like a moon to me? That was silly. I don’t mean your face is a cave or that it’s too pale, but that it shines in the dark among the stars, pulling my eyes toward it even when I would seek to look elsewhere. Maybe it’s gravity. I don’t believe in the soul or the idea of soulmates, but I believe in the moon. In its orbit, its tidal lock, moving away from us each year but with only one face turned toward us. That face has a rabbit, you know. Pounding mochi, or the elixir of immortality, or perhaps just cardamom between mortar and pestle. I think of the rabbit in the moon whenever I use my mortar and pestle, grinding cardamom, grains of paradise, pimiento de Jamaica, and whatever flavor I need to reach. Maybe the rabbit likes cumin. Maybe it would like my enchiladas. That moon, the way it was formed from much the same material as the Earth after a colossal collision, before either world had fully cooled and hardened into the atmospherically protected squished balls we are now, spinning at roughly a thousand miles an hour. I believe that speed feels like nothing because we evolved here, water creatures that we are, to live near the sea, near the lake, near the damp places we need. That the moon pulls us as it pulls the seas and we are tides within ourselves. You are a moon to me, a tide pull that is inviolate, insistent, ineluctable, so that whatever is damp beneath my skin waxes and wanes with the force of your face, facing me. Oh but in this analogy I am the sea, and that is too much. You said my face looked like a sunrise when I said it, blushing bright, and perhaps sunlight bent through the atmosphere feels the same. What a wonder, it might think, at the landscape before it. Perhaps the sun, too, says something silly. And blushes.