Bodies

When one grows up confronted, daily, by evidence that the body is fallible, does one then begin to discount its importance?

Did Rian grow up a creature of divorced spirit and flesh because as a child I learned how unreliable skin and bone and brain and lung could be? Did Rian grow up reaching for something else as permanence? Something less tangible but perhaps, in the end, strudier?

And yet I see beauty in the flesh. In the curve of a collarbone or the length of a leg or the elusive glint of light across a red mane of hair.

It will not be Rian's body that is remembered, but Rian's presence.