August 6, 2003
A Picture
I just wish my heart would explode and get it over with.
I'm restless this morning with the bed empty and his truck motoring away for Work Day #156,000 and counting. Our relationship isn't suffering from his seven day work week, but I am. And he isn't getting enough sleep.
He will soon leave the culinary world behind when he bids Argosy fairwell for a full time position at the University of Cincinnati, but that day seems so far away on mornings like this.
The light was filtering through the window, gray and muted, and I pulled the blankets closer to my chin and wondered if it made any difference whether or not I made the bed, or left it rumpled from our sleeping.
He comes in, rifling quickly through bluegrayblack shirts, pulling one over his head and shivering. He's right, it is cold.
I snuggle deeper under the covers, wishing it were his skin I was burrowing into. Sometimes I just wish there could be a morning, a day, a scant few hours of sunshine or moonlight, set aside just for us. He doesn't understand my need for a special moment. Neither do I.
He kisses me but I want to hang on and pull him back into bed, pull him back into me. He settles for a moment, and I wonder if it is for the touch of the cool sheets upon his skin and the promise of sleep, or is it for me, and what little warmth my flesh can offer him?
He doesn't know I hate waking up alone.
I have some pictures of the two of us doing funny things in front of a fountain. The fountain just outside Union Terminal, in case you want to know, home of the Cincinnati Museums of Natural and Otherwise History.
We saw a film at the Omnimax, a piece about Kilimanjaro and a group of folk that climbed it.
Mike smiled at me, his eyes full of active thought.
"You know, with the path we're on now, we'll be able to do things like that. I mean, if we put off having a family for a while."
And he's talking ten years from now, the two of us, climbing a mountain in Africa.
He loves me impossibly, and I know it. So I should shut up about everything else.
astera at 10:30 a.m.