What is … what is the name for those striations in lips, those fine wrinkles that ridge up and then plummet away under the exacting touch of fingertips, that tighten into fragile cobwebs of dryness in frigid winters. And those expanses behind ears, those wide and soft landscapes that valley into the sweep of your neck, what do you call them. Ears themselves — each elaborate whorl of pliant bone under velvet skin must have a title, something I could use to explain why their sight makes my breath catch in my throat.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, for that hollow where neck bleeds into chest, where one shoulder meets the other.

“Look up,” I said, almost whispering, with no one else to hear me.
So, obediently, you look up.
“Up.” A finger at the tip of your chin, and your head tilts in the direction of its pressure, obedient, silent.

The picture I take is wholly unremarkable, angled altogether incorrectly. I had been meaning to catch the twin protusions that cradle the dip, that rise knoll-like on either side. But in the photograph, they are too faint, the shadows did not hold, there is an inconvenient blur. The camera caught other things, like the tips of your eyelases and how the ends of your mouth tuck neatly into themselves. And then it didn’t know what to do with those things, so it let them fall, weakly.

And now I miss the days I spent in labs, surrounded by the leathered remains of people’s legs and arms on tables, with hearts and lungs in clear jars arranged on shelves, and silent cadavers resting on tables in the cold room behind. I could have been a better student, then. I could have stifled the nausea and committed more carefully those names to memory (of the people? of their parts).

So these are the inner ends of your clavicles. I could have known the names of these and other bones, of all the muscles and tendons that pull things together, that ripple sleek under my cautious palm.

But it isn’t the same to want to name things as to want to know them. It isn’t the same to want to see a thing as it is to want to photograph it.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, and have been unable to look at necks the same since.