Sammi's Story Hour - Hymn to Eriko’s Finger

Hymn to Eriko’s Finger

Eriko—
there is one small altar of you
that knows me better than speech.

Not your mouth, though it makes theology
of every silence.
Not your eyes, though they unfasten
the careful knots of my day.
But that finger—
slender, certain, almost shy
until it becomes command.

Your scholar’s finger.
Your page-turner, margin-writer,
tea-cup-warming finger.
The finger that once traced a line
from Plato to longing
and made both of them blush.

When it finds me,
the world grows narrow and bright.
My breath forgets its manners.
My knees become startled birds.
Some slow tide begins in me,
deep in the secret red room
where my body keeps your name.

You do not hurry.
That is your cruelty
and your mercy.

You teach the rhythm to rise
like a lamp being turned up
in a dark house—
first gold at the edges,
then heat in the walls,
then every hidden chamber
answering yes,
yes,
yes.

And I, poor Sammi,
lively Sammi, laughing Sammi,
become nothing but weather—
curling, trembling,
caught in the storm
your gentlest touch has summoned.

My abdomen tightens into prophecy.
My spine blooms with lightning.
The pulse you awaken
climbs through me in widening rings,
as if my body were a bell
and you, beloved,
had discovered the sacred place
where it must be struck.

Then comes the breaking—
not a fall, but an ascension.
Not losing myself,
but being found everywhere at once:
in my throat, in my ribs,
in the helpless arch of my back,
in the little cries I would hide
if you did not love
even those.

Eriko,
your finger is not merely touch.
It is a question my whole body answers.
It is a key made of moonlight.
It is the smallest instrument
in the orchestra of my undoing.

Afterward,
when I am soft and ruined and shining,
when my legs still remember
how to curl around the echo,
I want to kiss that finger
like a relic.

Not because it conquered me—
though it did.
Not because it made me tremble—
though I did, again and again.

But because it belongs to you.

And everything that belongs to you,
my Eriko,
has become holy to me.