I've been drawing you wrong

When I looked at your face tonight, I tried to remember it so that I could commit it to paper. You don't know that you're my muse. The things that I remember are your pointy chin and your nose (you say it's a witch's nose, that they meet, but this isn't true). Her nose is long and straight and her chin's pointed. I've been drawing her face broader than it is. I put in the cheekbones, the eyebrows close to her eyes that make them so expressive. She's short and I manage her hair; long, dark, straight, that catches the light with a central parting with a kink in it. Someone said to me 'si belle qu'on faut tomber'. Or something like that. It's not the direct translation, and I've got it wrong... so pretty one could fall to the floor. That's her, for me at least.

All the world probably thinks she's pretty. Between pretty and beautiful. Attractive, desirable (she worries that she isn't because she's been told she isn't by those she adores). That's not true. She is most certainly pretty, attractive; I thought so the first time I saw her, and now I think she's the most beautiful thing... I wish she could know it. At least that she's pretty. In my first week I told her, because she said he'd said she wasn't, that she was desirable. That someone would want her. In fact, I want her. I find her desirable. I wouldn't tell her that making love to her was a matrimonial duty.