Lover

I miss you.  

There are one million thoughts inside my head.  I cannot sleep.  I took diphenhydramine the past two nights since it was still quiet, my face wouldn't quit being wet, and the digital clock glared two-thirty mockingly in the main room.  In the past week I've lost my appetite for everything else, so the scale dropped numbers and I'm down seven pounds.  It's fucking pathetic and I know it.  I wish I was stronger.  I wish there was a strength to me because I'm getting sick of this desperate fragility.  

I'm picking myself apart.  I'm questioning everything.  You're elevated on a pedestal.  I'm missing all of you.  You become a perfect image.  I am nothing.  I am destroyed.  I am disgusting.  You can do no wrong.

This is so wrong.  

I have never know the unconditional love by a man.  I know I should not get me self worth ever from a man.  It should come from within.  But goddammit it's fucking hard.  

I would never treat someone like this.  I would never do this to you, baby.  I don't harbor that in my heart.  I didn't ask to be lied to.  You built me up.  You gave me such pretty words and promises.  Is it true, was it all lies?  I do not understand why someone would do this to another human being.

In every part of this small apartment there is you.  You making coffee in the morning.  You taking off your scrubs and putting them in the hamper.  You sleeping with Sammie atop of you.  You brushing your teeth in the shower.  

You don't have me anywhere in your space.  I am perfectly excised.  Perfectly surgically removed, not even a smear of blood to remind you that I ever existed at all.  

I want to scream.  I want to fucking rip out all of my hair.  

Why don't you care?  Why is there absence of anything from you?  

I am nothing.  I am small.  I am less than a speck of dust beneath your shoe.  I am invisible which is the worst hurt of all.  

But I am everything.  I am an amazing fury.  I am a hurricane.  I am the best damn fuck of your life.  I am the most tender stroke of your curls when you've had a horrible day at work.  I am that cup of tea in bed when you have a migraine.  I am the funny face to make you laugh.  I am the biggest fucking loss you'll ever know, Daniel Sain.  So you better not miss out.  Because I will love you better than any woman you have ever known or ever will.  

keys on the countertop and toothbrush removed

I have not felt compelled to write in a long time.  This depth of emotion is something that I haven't sat with, or rather I have not allowed to sit beside me, in a long, long time.

I love you, Daniel.  

We all know that love is a mere four letter word.  That we can use it for a multitude of things and vacillating feelings.  For instance, "I love gum", or "I fucking love that song".  But you, you are more than this love.  The absence of you is pain.  Not a fleeting, brief bandaid-tearing-off-pain, but a lasting agony that is like when you bite the inside of your mouth--you need to eat and drink, you keep feeling that agony with every moment that you are doing things you need to stay alive.

I thought about moving to Pennsylvania for you.  And creating a family with you.  I started to be comfortable enabling myself to think about being with you.  

For me, that is quite the accomplishment.  Because I have serious trust issues.

I know you as a good person.  As a compassionate, loving one.  I do not understand this, or what is going on.  I am going to try and give you the things that you need.  If I only knew you briefly in this life, I wish you well.  I have already prayed for you, and will continue to do so.  I will keep on loving you, and will continue to do so, even if that love changes over time--again, therein lies that difficulty with the word...it is so tiny a word for so vast a concept.  So inadequate and so unprepared for all that we must burden it with.  

I love this life.  I love my patients.  They teach me every day what tenacity and bravery and strength in the face of all that is fucking shitty and damning and painful is.  And so I fucking roll up my sleeves, and bear this.  I can do this.  I can survive.  I am a survivor.  I can do this.

I can do this.

I can chew.  I can swallow.  I can lift one foot after the next.

Thank you God for this life.