A Crooked Mouth

Richard Selzer in his book Mortal Lessons: Notes on the art of surgery recounts a story of a young woman and her husband following surgery:  


"I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish way.  A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed.  She will be thus from now on.  The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.  Her young husband is in the room. He stand on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private.  Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?  The young woman speaks, "Will my mouth always be like this?" she asks.  "Yes," I say, "it will.  It is because the nerve was cut."  She nods and is silent.  But the young man smiles. "I like it," he says, "It is kind of cute."  "All at once I know who he is.  I understand and I lower my gaze.  One is not bold in an encounter with a god.  Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works." 


An encounter with love is always though contorted lips. There is no other way to give or receive it. When I was young I marshaled my energies to achieve love under the movements of "acceptability" and various forms of "attractiveness".  But love would have none of it.  Now that I am older I see the twisted lips of my friends everywhere.  My salvation (and the worlds!) comes through the crooked mouth of love.