Feeling: peaceful
Listening to: Coldplay - Fix You
Reading/Watching: nothing

He likes to play music while we sleep. It comforts him, and provides a sort of white noise that drowns out exterior creaks and thuds and crying babies. For me, it is a wall of sound that tends to pervade my dreams with unusual images and surge in volume during loud songs, waking me up until the song is over.

Last night was no exception, but instead of falling back asleep after Damien Rice's "Eskimo" jolted me awake, I lay there, turning over and over, trying to get comfortable, thinking unusual things.

There was a time I couldn't stand sharing a bed with someone else. I needed my space. I needed the freedom to squirm and twist and hog the covers. At first, he was hurt when I would pull away from his body heat and seek cooler portions of mattress. Now, even when the welcome tangle of his arms and legs is still too much for me, I move a matter of inches away, still touching at some point, as if we can't bear to unattach. Back to back, or twining ankles, or touching hips. Part of my body must be certain that he is there.

I turn, and turn again, and guiltily unwind the sheets from my torso, feeding some of them back to his side, draping them over him. He takes that as an invitation to curve around my side and throw one leg and an arm over me.

It is four in the morning, and his alarm goes off at 5:50. I know that every time I stir, it wakes him up. I resolve to hold still, wait it out, and perhaps I'll drift back to sleep without needing to move. I can afford to go back to sleep once he's gone to work. He cannot afford to stay awake while I flop around like a trout.

Then, holding still makes me start to itch. I'm not sure if it's purely psychosomatic or the sheets have instantly become infested with ants, but I am itching, and I need to move to make it stop. My ankle. My cheek. Behind my ear. Underneath my armpit. The underside of my stomach.

I attempt to discreetly wriggle and rub the itches against the sheets to soothe them, until my fingertips wander to my lower belly, and find the ridge of a long scar. It itches underneath, but the flesh around the scar, an inch in each direction, is oddly numb.

It has been this way ever since the operation. At first it was alive with pain every minute (except when codeine chased it away), but then the stiches healed, the scar formed, and it became quiet and foreign, cadaverous. My fingers wander over this muted, dead skin, searching for a way to scratch the itch deep underneath it without severely damaging the numb exterior.

I feel that ridge, and think about how long it's been there, only a few months. Only since Sunday March 20th, 2005. Only since I went to the ER with a stomach ache and had a 16-cm cyst removed. I think about my old biology textbooks in highschool, and the pictures of the women's anatomy, a soft, pearlike outline with the Y-shaped apparatus inside. I wonder how mine must look now, a one-armed Y, one fallopian tube, one ovary, the other strangled and extracted.

I think about how mon coeur treated me like glass at first, then eagerly held me once I was home and healing, only to accidentally touch the jagged purple smile, and be distraught when I hissed in pain. By the time it happened twice or three times, I had learned how to hold myself so that he wouldn't reach for that scar. Then I couldn't feel it anymore. His touch was always gentle when he explored that little pink ridge, as if he was remembering the long, horrible day it got there. I thought about how grateful I was that he remembered the way it used to look, smooth and ridgeless, and grateful that he was there on the day it changed, so I would never have to answer awkward questions. So that he would always know, same as me. I wouldn't have to explain why I took medication to make sure my body didn't turn traitor again, didn't build a tumor inside itself to render me completely infertile someday. He already knew. He was there.

And I thought about how glad I was, that he was there. That for now, and then, and every other scar, every other pain, every other fear, every other sad story that I would ever have to tell, he would be there. He would witness it firsthand, same as I would witness his. Like we were one person, he would know me, and I would know him.

And finally, as Damien Rice stopped singing and Coldplay came on, I drifted back to sleep, turning to fit my stomach to his spine, tucking my body shape around him to enjoy being like one person just a little bit more.

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