Time spent in the hospital, it teaches you things.

For example:

There is a certain impass reached between nurses and their patients. Theirs is the difference between feeling and doing. Between emotion and form.

Also:

We dream ourselves medically advanced and yet sick patients stretch out on stretchers, lining hospital hallways, waiting for rooms to empty out.

For someone to die. Someone else to heal and head home. Such is the difference between precision and reality.

We shake our heads in dismay. We say, “This is unbelievable, the system is broken.” But we join the queue. Spend long hours waiting like everybody else.

Surrender to the difference between perfection and humanity.

It seems to me now, at five o clock on a Tuesday morning. On a new day dawned after a long night spent standing still by her side. Watching chaos whirl around us in one million cacophonous intersections of incessant beeps and bed rolls. That all these symphonic routines are pointed at obscuring a single obvious aspect of our lives: the unavoidable fragility of the human form. The helplessness of our collective condition.

I approach your body with the same mix of fear and adoration with which I face my own.

The same care.

Concern.

Fascination and pride.

It’s a sense of responsibility, I suppose. A sense of accountability. A sense so different from the blind curiosity I turn upon a lover.

Or the fuzzy edged lens through which I see my friends.

Each night I run my hands over both our skins. Trace the dips of my own. The lines and ligaments of yours. Places I’ve touched a million times before. Places I return to time and again. Savor when I can and yearn for when I cannot. The way a child wants for a warm blanket. A parent’s arms.

I could chart years over the terrain of your body. Find myself, no matter how long I’ve been missing, in a moment blinked by in the abstract reflection of your eyes.

Time moves with the same fluidity as your hair over your skin over your bone. Over thick lines of vein whittled gracefully to thin. Each one charting challenges I took on. Stages I traversed. Rebellions I staged.

Still you stand on. Aged today in details but reminiscent in whole of this life I cycle through. The person I remain despite it all. The way old maps confirm foundations of a place even after, with the passing of years, new houses have been built and new ground has been struck.

I am determined to explore old frontiers. Traverse new ones. Holding you, as I unknowingly have each time before, as my map.

Disappointment has settled – mixed with fear – into the space below my sternum.

Into the body I’m so unsure of.

It’s a selfish sentiment, driven, I fear, by a desire to be free.

To move, unfettered by fear….by the constant thought of what I might lose:

The joy of her beside me, feet up on the dashboard, reading maps, picking songs. Riding shotgun all the way to California.

The confidence that things will ever be the same again.

The unconscious certainty that my heart won’t attack at any moment. Won’t stop. Won’t break.

These things… are not what they should be. Not an ever present empathy for her pain.

An unwavering attention placed upon the importance of recovery. And the quick assertion that we’ve got months. All the time she needs.

I should be. But I am not.

So easy going.

I want her back.

Want her to look at me through a mother’s eyes and not from the frightened face of a child.

It’ll be alright, I say. Take her hand. Kiss her forehead. Rub her feet. Feed her pills.

But what do I know?

Underneath it all I’m just that little girl. The same one who crawled onto her mommy’s blue sheeted hospital bed over a decade ago now. Lay her cheek across the blankets and listened for the sound of stomach stitches. Fingered IV tubes. Called for extra ice cream.

The little girl who asked, does this hurt mommy? And received in reply a smile and a no. A white lie. The kind that parents give to children, hoping to guard small hearts from worry and fear.

It was first, a love. Kindled by the purity of childhood. The willingness of young hearts to abandon the fear of inadequacy. The ability to think within moments rather than years.

So it was first free and full of unbridled possibility.

Before, with the addition of time and the removal of sweet oblivion, it became a passion. A drive towards success, towards proving an indeterminable element.

Before it became a sadness. A fear. And a seemingly impossible path back to love. The beginning. The essence embodied by equs. By girl.

It was a brave thing I did. Walking away. Abandoning one extreme for another – this one cloistered in bright lights and siren screams. The City.

I took New York on. Banked everything on its potential to change me. To pull me from the rigid case I’d built. The scaly skin of perfection.

Non linearly, it did this. . Built up old walls only to break them down. Peeled away layers with invisible precision – the kind only mobilized in retrospect. Only understood in reflection.

From this place I’ve rediscovered. This horse. This unencumbered joy.

One day, over a year ago now, my father came to New York. To the same table I’m sitting at now.

In this same coffee shop. We sat and spoke about my feelings.

He heard and then forgot everything I said.

The neighborhood’s changed now. Strollers seem in equal proportion to slouchy hipsters and sandal wearing twenty one years olds.

I approve of this subtle transformation. Think it a positive point wrought by recession.

Or maybe I just like to sit smugly to the side, watching those three girls huddle around the corner table of the 76^th street Starbucks, flat ironing their hair. Feel special for having outgrown so much excitement over being seen.

My thrills are found more in between my quiet bed sheets these days. In the space between my body and my own uninterrupted thoughts. In the movement of horse over soft sand. Over hours of time-less partnership.

Does this make me more evolved than my past? Perhaps.

Still, it dawned on me today that I might want to belong to something. Fit somewhere.

I no longer think I do in New York. Fit.

I feel too much for the place. Overwhelm too easily.

Perhaps I’m a wimp to admit so. Especially after five years spent trying to convince myself otherwise.