Hurt.

I had to leave my lover in the hospital tonight, deliriously sleeping from drugs imbibed to get him through the relatively minor surgery involved in reinflating his collapsed right lung.

The thirst in me is endless. My fingers feel like lead. I am terrified to sleep alone tonight.

I’m going to go visit him in the morning. They say he’ll be a few days, to repair. I’ve fallen even further in hate for that building for keeping him from me that long… not as if my arms would do well in healing him. Such a bitterness in me, at that. Here spawns another week of tension and of bad memories that I do not wish to repeat, in that hospital. But this time it’s necessary. This time someone needs it.

He asked me not to cry but I couldn’t stop. I cried so much. I’m so afraid right now. My body is tired, and I can’t hide from work too long with this. But at the same time the thought of crawling into that bed, which should be warm with his body, is almost as painful as having to leave him alone, in an unfamiliar room, hooked up to an IV and oxygen and wires that would write down that life, that means so much to me, into varicolored lines on a six by six inch monitor.

Off I go to try and bury my anguish in pillows to familiarly scented.

Observations

Eleven lines of poetry, and countless unreal hours, later, I return.

It was worst in the night. Not only was I lacking my usual means of heating the blankets up for me, but when I become stressed (in my body or my spirit) my blood temperature drops and there is ice all around me. I tossed and turned, discontent and worried out of my mind. If I so much as dozed off, I awoke not long later feeling worse than I already had.

I began to realize. Nothing this traumatic has happened to me for a long time, and maybe not ever. This has been an exceedingly different and difficult situation, from which I draw the following observations:

I spent most of last night exceedingly frightened, worried, and sad. This is to be expected when someone you love has been operated on for a serious medical issue, especially one with so unexpected an onset as this one. Usually, there are very salient physical sensations that go along with each of these emotions. I spent last night devoid of them utterly. All I had to try and hang onto was this deep emptiness in my chest, and a deep feeling of suffocation. I noticed that the most.

My tiger is being such a sport about the whole matter. I spent most of the day with him. We played games my mother sent him from the toystore, and colored geometric patterns in a coloring book, with colored pencils. I spent many hours perched at the opposite end of his bed, just talking. He’s back in his general good spirits, and there were moments where I almost forgot where we were sitting and why.