My husband’s back is something to marvel at.

It’s wide like a canvas, scattered with brown spots of varying shapes and shades — a celestial map, charting some hidden treasure known only to me.

I’m especially fond of the constellation on the lower right side. Among its stars sits a pale white dot — the scar from a biopsy that removed a piece of possibly cancerous tissue. What’s left is not just a healed wound, but a spot of erasure — a small place where something once lived and now does not. A deletion in his skin. A blank in the map. My sky with one silent void.

His back has always been a map of our life together — a kind of compass.

When he’s worried, I can see the muscles twitch and shift under his spotted skin, even at night while he sleeps.

When he’s sad, his back folds inward, as if trying to take up less space.

When he’s angry, red streaks appear — the marks of his own fingernails dragging across his skin in frustration, trying to claw away the cause.

When he’s well, his back expands, strong and broad from regular workouts.

When he’s depressed, the workouts stop, and his back thins and shrinks. I’ve seen every version of it.

It’s also covered in fine hair that drifts across the skin like clouds across a sky — soft, gentle, protective. Early in our relationship, he once asked, shyly, if I would do him a strange favor: shave his back.

I fell in love with him in that moment, right there in the bathroom. He stood facing the mirror, watching me watch him. I saw my future in that mirror — his back, my hands, our reflection. That’s the moment I became his wife.

And when he left me — when I became his past — I saw his back one final time. Still a compass, still giving direction, only this time it was pointing toward the end.

Sometimes I wonder about the next woman who will shave his back.

Will she see what I saw?

Will she love the map as much as I did?