My love for you is like Henna

My love for you is like henna. Yes it is beautiful. Yes, takes time and patience to built. Yes it seams to fade... Every 3 weeks or so... Yes, intricate patterns creating flowers and leaves, all world's nature sinking into my skin. Nature from that path we took to the beach everyday, next to the wild buffalos in south Lantau. Nature from those mountains we climbed in Argentina (remember? Oh how you love those cold hikes...). Yes, intricate pattern spiraled from our ecstatic love making visiting the ashrams in India. Yes, intricate pattern made of sharp edges from the unkind words emerging during our fights in Hong Kong. Yes, intricate... Sacred geometry designs, with yantras, Om and prayers, from our talks on spiritually, on planes (the ones that made a 14 hour flight go bye so fast, remember?). Henna has a scent, have you felt it? It does not smell like flowers, it is not perfume, it is a strong pungent smell that stays with you for the time the beauty lasts. You never forget you have henna even if you hide the tattoos. Intoxicating, more sensitive souls would say. I kind of like it... Henna is used to celebrate. Henna is used to purify. Henna is used to induce relaxation in the bride and women that help her during the stressful days of the wedding (did you know this?). Henna is used to bless... You told me once how beautiful it is that the women being hennaed have to be helped to do everything. If it's in your feet, you cannot walk If it's drying in your hands, you cannot eat. It's a ritual, a rite of passage. Yes, I can see how my love for you is like this henna I am so fascinated about... Henna tattoos take time, take love. Are gifts from artistic hands and soft hearts (yes I believe so. could you draw henna with an angry heart?). Henna is all the sacredness of the feminine, birthing beauty no matter what conditions. Have you heard of war zones, or natural disaster zones, where the women, emptied from all goods and sometimes loved ones, walk far, to go up in the mountains, to collect henna leaves and create the magic paste? Yes they do. They work for beauty. And beauty is love. My love for you is like henna... An art I even started to learn and tried to practice... Lost in the cones, hard to hold like a pen; and in the motifs, hard to draw and memorize. My love for you is like henna and I always feel when the design is fading... like if every spiritual cleansing I do is washing more of my skin, bathing my body... Me, siting, alone with the flowing water... Silently (sometimes painfully) watching the art fade away... My love for you is like henna and I feel all the heavy maintenance it takes, so many hours to create, so many secrets to help it look brighter and stronger, and so easy to let... it... all... fade... away. And I used to feel how demanding is this magic, how rooted in rules it lives, how... Easy is it to do it "wrong"... And I used to feel that if I did not take the time to sit down to work my magic, collecting the leaves, drying them to powder, mixing the paste (maybe adding the black tea, the lemon, the turmeric tricks to it), making the cones, and religiously apply it to my skin, letting it sink for a whole night, and keeping it away from water a whole day... it would just go.. Vanish... Yes, sometimes I feel my love for you is like henna... And it's time... To drop the effort and let it fade forever... Or... To make it a real, forever, tattoo.