My roommate isn't an especially good-looking guy.

I look over at him, as I reflect, even though I don't really have to at this point -- he's been living in my apartment for longer than I was married, and evidence of that fact is everywhere. I can smell his scent from across the room, and hear his heartbeat from across town, and see his smile when I close my eyes.

He doesn't know I'm watching him now; he's wrapped up in some textbook, A Cultural History of People You've Never Heard Of, and a bomb could go off and not distract him. He's chewing absently on the cap of his highlighter, and his brow is knit, drawing his eyes closer together.

Those eyes. They're not anything special, when you come right down to it -- blue, like thousands of other people's eyes; my own, for instance -- and actually, now that I look carefully, it looks like they're a little lower on his face than they ought to be. And his lips, which at the moment are curling back from his teeth, where he's chewing on the highlighter: there's nothing actually wrong with them -- in fact, I've heard a lot of people get highly complimentary about his mouth -- but lips that full on a mouth that wide and you start to think Well, what is he, a man or a fish? Great lips, I mean to say, unless you're looking at them.

He has good skin -- trust me, I can tell -- but it's a strange tone, fair and olive all at once, as though his genetic code got confused some time between his conception and his birth. That would explain the hair, too, come to think of it -- curly and snarly and frankly the most unruly mop I've ever seen. It's as if the ol' genes, trying to sort the input into the appropriate areas, just threw everything in one pot and said Okay! We give up!

There's no point trying to talk to me about his voice. It's the only thing I can latch on to when I space out on something bright or cold or whatever, so I'm always glad to hear it -- but at the same time, even when he's not calling me back to the land of the living, the kid never shuts up. File that one under Mixed Blessing, note that there are certainly pleasanter sounds in the world (and ones you can decide whether you're going to hear or not), and move on.

And he bounces around all the time. Leftover energy from the corkscrew curls, maybe -- like, if he didn't zip all over the place like a damn wind-up toy, the hair would be even crazier. My roommate, the human lightning-rod. Makes me dizzy.

He's not a lot different than a whole lot of other people, really: not startlingly good-looking, or remarkably more skilled at more things than anyone else, or any of those other things that lovers usually rhapsodize about. Except that I love him with every fiber of my being -- I love him with fibers I didn't know my being had before I met him. That alone makes me gladder to see him at the end of the day than if he were a damn pin-up boy, gladder to hear his voice than if it were the voice of God. Let the world have their models, and their rock stars, and their Beautiful People. I have Blair.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
   Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
   If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
   But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
   Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
   That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
   My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.


Sonnet CXXX
William Shakespeare

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