May 30, 2008 - 12:53 AM.

Denied

Some days, all feels well in the marriage bed. There is synesthesia: my skin turning a pale sparkly aqua color, my flesh tiding like water, a radiant fire-flush spreading through all my cells as I melt into the sheet. His body makes a rushing, singing sound when his aura moves under and into me, and I drink the stretching, reaching, sky-blue and amber-brown light as it rises up out of him and blows across and through me.

Other days, my husband is emotionally and bodily exhausted from a day spent living hard in the land of arthritis and the pursuit of its doctors. And it is hard on me that on some of those days, by luck of bad timing, I want so much to be close to him, that I get switched on just seeing him take off his shirt for the stethoscope. It's hard on me because I know ahead of time that when I approach him at the end of the day -- still a little shyly, after all these years -- other things will already have taken away all of that energy from him.

He is always kind about it, and I am grateful for that. But still -- it's a little hard. To approach my lover and be turned down, however kindly, in favor of watching Lost (which I then took no pleasure in, it took me a whole hour just to ramp down) -- it was a little humiliating, frankly.

I just wanted to be close. It is hard to bear when I have asked for too much. Because I know what I am missing.

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