#SOL16: Love

Breathe (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

Rob sleeps.

It's late and the darkness beyond the hospital window is no longer new. Everything quiets as night settles deep inside its bones.

For the many hours I spend seated beside his bed, my husband sleeps most of them, waking now and then to mutter a string of random words, a Morse code I sometimes can piece together. And here's the strange thing about love for though there is surely tedium to this waiting,
            to not having him home, to the unsettled constancy that now defines our lives--

somehow, this antiseptic space is the only place where the tremor in my hand slows
and my heart steadies.

I notice the rise and fall of his chest and turn away,
turn back to this screen to write.

All the time, I listen for his breath.