Mark.

She stood there, tears streaming down her face as she collected her things from the home we had once shared together. The parting was mutual but also mutually upsetting. I watched her close up her last box, unable to move or say anything, paralyzed by fear of loss, fear of moving on. I couldn’t believe I was going to watch her walk out of our door – now my door – for quite possibly the very last time in my life. I made an effort to move forward, wet my lips with my tongue and part them to say something of some substance, though I don’t even know if my mind knew what is was yet. And that’s when I saw her face, tear-stained and broken, the only way I hated to see it. And I began to tear up.

I’m not a man that cries often, and even through the treacherous break-up I’ve been holding it together fairly well, on the outside anyway. But the moment I caught a glimpse of the small, darkened spot on her left cheek, just before her hair fell and covered it again, I began to lose it. It was only a birthmark, one I had seen a thousand times before in our life together, but the meaning behind it brought tears to the brim of my eyes that threatened to spill over.

It wasn’t her only birthmark, and it wasn’t the most prominent one either. In fact, it could go unnoticed by people, even those who knew her well, for years. Only the people who truly got to know her, the ones she shared her whole self with, knew about that mark.

Seeing it I was immediately transported back to the first day we moved in together. We were all smiles and uncertainty moving into our 700 square foot apartment with our IKEA furniture and Target-brand everything else. That night, as we prepared to crawl into bed, she retreated to the bathroom to remove her make-up as I waited, reading a magazine in bed. I remember thinking how crazy it was not how long it takes a woman to get ready but how long it takes her to get unready. As she came out, fresh-faced, hair up in a lopsided bun, wearing flannel pajamas and a cotton t-shirt, I noticed it for the very first time. And somehow I felt like everything would be okay. The panic of living with a new person, sharing your life with them, growing up and all those feelings that come with it all, dissipated.

Given it’s position on her face, and how light and nearly invisible the mark actually is, it’s not something that many notice. You’d think a birthmark on the face would be a fairly prominent characteristic, but every morning the makeup would erase the spot and it wasn’t until nighttime when she wiped off her daily mask that I would see the little mark, if only for a second, before she rolled over and went to bed.

That birthmark began to signify something greater to me. It was about intimacy and closeness, this odd form of non-verbal communication that I began to take as possibly the greatest signal of trust you could reach with somebody. When her birthmark was visible, she was vulnerable, and it held this magic power that could end all fights.

When the tears would start streaming after a large argument or a small tragedy, sometimes one in the same, and she would wipe the flowing saltwater droplets from her cheeks, the make-up would smear away and I would catch the tiniest glimpse of that symbolic birthmark. I never told her what it meant to me but the second I saw it, or there was a promise of it beneath her rich, chocolate-colored hair, I would tuck her hair behind her ear, envelope her in my arms, and apologize for every wrong I’d ever done onto her. Because a women who allows you to experience all of her – that vulnerability that comes only with true love – deserves to win every fight ever fought.

The fact that no one knew about her subtle birthmark made it like this unspoken secret. I never told her its impact on me, and subsequently our relationship. I’d never told anybody. It’s impossible to verbalize the affect of something so private and unnoticeable to anyone in the world. Because I knew no one, not even her, would understand.

As she turned toward me that day in the apartment we once shared, and would soon no longer share, mascara-stained face and tiny swipes of makeup erased from the places she tried to clear her salty tears, I knew it was there. Under her pin-straight hair that smells of vanilla and honey, I would find her stamp of vulnerability. Her tiny imperfection that was so essential to our relationship. I thought back to our hardships, our nights spent together under covers laughing, playing, just being together and being us. I knew in that moment I couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let her walk out the door we shared, and hopefully wouldn’t stop sharing, until we found a new door to call our own.

I shut my mouth, because no words would do, I moved toward her with great intent, and I tucked her hair behind her ear, catching a fleeting image of that little mark. As I breathed in vanilla and honey, she wrapped her arms around my back and sobbed harder. And while I didn’t know the future, I knew, in that moment, we would be okay. We were always okay.