As many of you know, I'm going in the hospital on Monday and will be gone for a while. Still, I can't seem to stop writing, and I've been making notes on the novel that's stewing in my aching head.

But I feel as if I cannot go in the hospital without paying tribute to the man who, for the past 18 months, has enriched my life in ways that I didn't know were possible. 

This is not a dis of the men who were in my past. But, my past is my past. What I have now, my NOW, is glorious. I feel like a kid learning to swim. The water is warm, my arms and legs are trying to find their rhythm, but through it all, this man stands, his arms supporting me, and I know that I won't drown. 

I know this because on Friday night, I thought I was going to die. My headache became so intense that I vomited, my eyelid drooped, my speech slurred, and the pain made me want to hurt myself in order to make it stop. What made me stop was my love, who held me, stroked my head, fed me medicine, found ways to make me laugh, touched and caressed me, and, when I was so stoned on pain medicine that I felt embarrassed, took me up to friends' house, where we played Scrabble and worked toward keeping my mind off my head. 

So this, as I get ready to enter the hospital for an unknown period of time, is a public thank you note to the man who each and every night, holds my body against his as we sleep, who whispers things in my ear that gentle me as if I were a wild horse, who touches me in such a way that I come in ecstacy and yet cry for the joy of knowing that our bodies, our hearts, were meant to be together, even as we spent years apart. 

I read a poem yesterday that spoke to the feelings I have for him. I quote it here: 

***

Francesca Lia Block, from her collection Open Letter to Quiet Light

first date

in spite of what we had lost
our bodies said yes at the first touch
before our minds felt the fear


or did they say yes because of what we had lost?
abandonment takes many forms
but the need for solace
made us brave


we rolled on the floor with the flowers you'd brought
an unspoken question in your hands

you untied my white dress
sucked on my breasts
you reached up inside me and discovered me wet
you said now i can wait because now i know this will be


let me fuck away the pain
suck away the pain
tuck away the pain
let me flick away the pain
lick away the pain
slick away the pain
let me tease the pain
ease the pain
appease the pain


in spite of what i have been through and maybe because of it
let me tell you this
this
is the best time of my life right now
no one can take that away
this is how
i will always
remember it

***

I am frightened of going into the hospital. I've been in the hospital before. Hospitals are bereft of feeling; they are sterile, cold places where we go when our bodies need to be tended to. But my spirit suffers in the hospital. I lie in the bed and I obsess about how much I hate being where I am, how much I hate the sensation of the IV needle in my arm, the cold/hot/pain/itch as the medicine drips into me, the loneliness of a room where my caretaker shows up as often as s/he can, but who has so many sicker patients on the floor that I have to force myself to hit the "call" button and do so only when I feel my situation is serious enough to be tended to. 

This time, I know that friends and an ex-boyfriend--some even from OS--will come visit me. But this weekend, as I contemplate the trip to the hospital, the withdrawal process of getting off the opiates and putting my faith in the new drugs that should abort the headaches before they gestate, I know that I will carry my love with me. Even if he cannot be there every moment because of work, his presence will curl up next to me in the bed. He will brush back my hair from my eyes, stroke my forehead, hold me against his warmth, promise me that pain is a temporary state and that it will pass. 

My love and I have acknowledged how fortunate we are. How many people get the chance when they are 53 and 46 to feel the kind of passion that drives us to make love every day; that allows us to work silently, side by side, knowing that the energy that warms the room warms us; that out of the blue, while we're at work, one of us will send a text or an e-mail with a simple affirmation of this miraculous coming together? 

Perhaps this is obnoxious. I'm not bragging. I'm not telling you this because I'm trying to one-up anyone in their feelings for their partner. But for someone like me, who spent her life feeling not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not nice enough, not sane enough, not enough--to have found someone who thinks I rock the world--is a miracle. 

And it took me finding myself before I could find him. I had to learn to spend weeks alone. I had to learn to revel in my own company. I had to learn that being alone was not a punishment but an opportunity to experience solitude--that company of the self, as May Sarton calls it. I was not a needy, grasping woman when we met. I was not looking for my other half. I was not incomplete. But instead, I brought myself to him as a whole person--not perfect by any means, and still prone to moments of such intense self-abnegation and doubt that I would keen over my imperfection--but still, when I met him, the two of us brought to each other our whole selves. 

And he loves all of me. Even my children--who in watching me fall in love, feared that they would lose their mother--and he has worked through their trepidations not by trying to buy their affections, but rather, by showing them, all the time, what it means to be a reliable partner who shows up even when it's inconvenient. 

I wish, oh god how I wish, that I could put into language the sensations in my body that he evokes. Of course some of those feelings are sexual. I think I get wet the moment he walks into a room. But it's more than that. It's this letting go of fear. It's the sense that, regardless of how shitty the world is outside our door, inside our apartment is refuge. I relax here. I put things down here. I stop carrying the burden. 

I float.