love/sick

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we lay silently under the string of lavender lights strung across the wall above the bed, pathetic and still.  we are both sick.  sick as dogs, angry and miserable inside out atoms.  we lay together and treat each others bodies with the gentleness we routinely refuse our own.  stroking hair and testing foreheads and cheeks for too much warmth.  i kiss his shoulder rather than his lips.  enough damage has already been done.  swaddled in deep grey blankets, we convalesce.  the timing is bad but not as bad as it might have been.  i should have known some wiley germ would eventually catch up to me.  i lucked out not getting sick while on my trip and i am thankful for that.  it would've been awful to spend time stuck in bed rather than drawing against the tall, white walls in my huge, beautiful studio or singing karaoke at the pizza parlor/bar.  still, this misery is miserable.  such a waste of life to be sick.  time slips and fails.  i guzzle more NyQuil and hope that tomorrow all will be well within my body again and that the impetuous rhythm of waiting tables and making art will resume with as much fury as (more fury than) it had before.

i roll over and his hand finds my back.  he rubs me gently as i lay with my eyes closed against the pressure in my sinuses despite his own discomfort.  i marvel at this.  his kindness.  a moment of total pleasure inside this stubborn illness.  i marvel at him.

his hand stops and i roll the other way.  i want to see his face. 



every night, his face is the last thing i see and i want it to go on being that way. 

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