TENDERNESS

© JVieira

The word love, he had said, it is not always breaking down into other things? Into bitterness, yearning, jealousy – all the parts of the whole. May be there’s a better word, something too simple to become anything else.
But what word could be so incorruptible? She had asked. What word so infallible?
And Lucjan, to whom words were a moral question, had said: tenderness.

Anne Michaels in The Winter Vault