Dating and Surgery

The event that threatened to tear apart our relationship the most was something that I had hoped would bring us closer. I had expected it to be the four months spent in separate countries at the very beginning of our relationship. We were constantly wrought with desperation for a few simple lines of text to appear on our laptops saying Hi or I miss you. Two months in and the distance fused a bond between us, creating closeness to the other that could only be obtained with words. I thought that if we could get through being so far apart we could brave anything.

I was going to have more surgery to help ease some of my pain. More surgery, I had been through it all a thousand times, but it was his first time. He didn’t know how to handle the fluctuations in my mood and the fear that began to cripple me. I was hoping that the surgery would once again bring us closer, because I would finally have someone to share my anxiety with, someone I could depend upon. I knew it would be stressful, I even warned him that I would become depressed and clingy. I tried to hold myself back but I couldn’t help it. Normally I would never become clingy, instead I would withdraw, but he had completely torn away any emotional armor that I had.

It started two weeks before the surgery date. He was very supportive, helping me run around and complete a list of tasks before what I had deemed the end of my summer, June 1^st. We snuck onto the roof of the building where he worked and had a midnight picnic staring up at the stars. We didn’t care that our clothes would become covered in tar dust, it was just nice to escape from the world beneath us and pretend that we could hide up there forever. I began to be in such a rush to complete all the little activities on my list that I barely enjoyed any of them, it turned into a goal that I had to reach instead of a way to make sure I had fun for my last couple of days. Then the surgery date rolled around and he was there to hold my hand. When I finally came to it was so late at night that I only had a few precious minutes to see him before he had to depart for bed and work early in the morning. The days in the hospital passed in a blur filled with texts and quiet phone calls. He then returned with my family to take me home and he spent the first night taking care of me in place of my mother.

The first month continued with barely a hitch, he showed up as often as he could and entertained me over the phone every night. When July rolled around it had become too much. He had dealt with a whole months of neediness and sadness and now it was finally taking its toll. Nothing was improving or getting better. He began to feel helpless, that nothing could make me feel better. He was wrong, all I needed was someone to sit and hold my hand and watch movies with me all day. But as waves of pain hit the first fight began. He couldn’t make the pain go away and I didn’t expect him to, but he couldn’t just sit there and watch. He yelled that I wasn’t doing everything I could to make my pain go away, that I had forgotten an option or a pill. Through periods of pain we were at each other’s throats and the fight only dissipated as the pain did. The fights continued for the next two months, whenever he could not help there was a strain. I didn’t need much but it was too little for him to give, he could not understand that I didn’t need him to make it all better.

Slowly as the pain eased so did the fighting, but it had definitely left its mark. We were closer than ever, he knew things, disgusting things, about my body that only I knew and he understood what my life had been like. But all the fights were still sitting there, piled up behind us and ready to nudge us into another ridiculous and circuitous debate.