They took you into hospital and slit you at the neck like an animal - this was your introduction to the house of the sick and the dead after 28 years.
I swore my love for you before you went in, and prayed to gods unknown and invented for your safe return. I set myself challenges which, if passed, would mean you'd come out alive.
There is, then, a deep and yet invisible seam of devotion which is never seen and seldom spoken of - I think this is only the second time I've ever mentioned it. Nobody knows the extent to which I exhaust myself in your name.
Like an expectant father, I sat by Facebook for hours waiting for news, and at something after 5:30 in the morning, it came - she's over the worst of it, and I could relax. Facebook, the modern telegram which screams: she lives!
They'd dug deep into you with their instruments, distorting your surface, but making no indentation into your loveliness. It (whatever 'loveliness' comprises - it's a poor word, but I seek to express myself beyond 'beauty') remained, undiminished when you'd been glued back together again - even the sharpest scalpel runs aground against a woman's soul.
When you woke up from the operation, I think you woke up from our dream as well. Rubbing your eyes in amazement, I'd become a pillar of salt, a gargoyle - you, however, were still the caryatid that prevented me falling out of the sky.
You woke up from our dream, and I've never been able to get you back to sleep. As in a fairytale, I search through my vocabulary for the magic word that will put you under again, but I am yet to find it. I am all out of spells, out of invocations.
I had always been scared of what would happen if you should stir abruptly and disturb the narrative we put together. Now I know - I have been found guilty of being a man, a mere man who fails to shave and can't cook and glumly holds down a job. When the hospital opened your neck, they opened your eyes too, and what they see is no longer worth being in love with.
