True Love
When I met Austin over a decade ago, it was the closest I think I’ve ever come to love at first sight.
He was charming and funny and smart (and he knew it) and I met him literally two weeks after separating from my soon-to-be ex-husband. Austin made me feel interesting and comfortable and sexy. He made me feel incandescent.
The night we met, when I excused myself to get another pitcher of Rubaeus for the table, he leaned over to our mutual friend and said, “I fucking love this girl. When can I marry her?”
Three years later to the day, in the exact place we met, we got married. It felt like kismet, like no one in the history of the world had ever loved each other the way that we loved each other. In my vows, I said these words to him…
On the day that we met, you lit up a place inside me where before there was only darkness. Loving you is like having the entire sun inside my body. My heart was made to love your heart. You make every cliché about love true. I never used to understand what people meant about their spouses being their best friends, but now I do because you are mine.
For years, we stayed high off our asses on all those feel-good neurotransmitters that peak during the infatuation stage of a new relationship. It felt like there was something uniquely magical about our relationship — the euphoria and boundlessness, the oddly specific compatibility, the unconditional permission to be our full selves with each other.
But that’s not the love that brings me to my knees.
What’s happened to me over the past year has broken and changed me in ways that I’ve hated. I’ve spent a lot of time in bed curled on my side, crying and ugly and desperate.
When Austin helped me decide to move forward with a surgical plan that essentially amounted to a total ankle reconstruction, I didn’t know it, but I was about to see the truest true love.
Despite the hefty price tag (and how geriatric it made me feel), he strong-armed me into buying a new mattress with an elevatable head + foot. During the first blurry weeks post-op, he fed me and made sure I was taking my meds on schedule. He arranged a mountain of pillows in the exact way I liked multiple times a day to keep my left leg elevated high enough to be “toes over nose.” He washed dishes and took care of rambunctious dogs and grocery shopped. He did laundry and changed sheets and held me when I got overwhelmed and broke down in anxious sobs.
But the most beautiful thing happened when I needed to take my first post-op shower a few days after surgery.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had to bathe while not being allowed to put any weight on one of your legs, but it’s tricky at best and, if you’re fresh off serious trauma or surgery, your foot starts to feel like a throbbing lead balloon within minutes.
Austin bought a shower stool for me, scrubbed my back and rinsed my hair, and helped me carefully climb in and out of the shower, wet and bulky and lumbering like a sulky walrus.
I was not at my best. In many ways, I’m still not.
But he’s never faltered. Relentlessly kind, optimistic without minimizing my fear or pain, unfailingly patient.
That’s true love, y’all. And I will never take it for granted.