“Don’t worry,” you say. “I’ll take care of it.”
I’m sick. Suffering from a hemiplegic migraine. The left side of my body has betrayed me once again by putting out its own lights. I knew I was in trouble the moment that the aura started. I did my best to close my eyes and relax.
But later, the left side of my face goes numb. And then my arm, my hand. My leg.
The word centers of my brain are similarly also turning sluggish. I still have my words, but I don’t know for how long (in the past, I’ve become aphasic when the blood vessels in my skull start to swell like this).
It’s all I can do now to talk to you about where my medicine is. It doesn’t help that I have unpacked my things but not perfectly. You find my pills in a backpack in the back of the closet. The one I use as my carry-on whenever I fly.
You find me something to drink. I take my pill. Crash hard. The pills counteract the swelling in my blood vessels, work by effectively stepping on the hose. Constricting that circulation.
I nap for several hours. It’s absolutely the wrong time of day for this.
But you stay with me, working on a project so you can be close to me. So I won’t be alone. So you can keep an eye on me.
I sleep for an embarrassingly long time, only waking up because one of the cat bounces up and down on my sternum, using his little legs like pogo sticks. Only thing missing is the _sproing _sound.
That’s what wakes me up. The reason I stay awake is because I’m hungry. I’ve managed to sleep until dinnertime.
“Don’t worry,” you say. “I’ll take care of it.”
You ask me what I’m in the mood for. My brain is fuzzy enough from the controlled migraine and the medication side effects that I’m not even sure what I’m saying. But you whip up a delicious meal before I even register that you’re cooking it.
You bring it to the chair I’m sitting in. Bring me a tray table. A napkin. A drink.
After the meal, I try to get up and clean up after myself.
“Don’t worry,” you say. “I’ll take care of it.”
And it’s then, as you’re taking care of me yet again, that I realize that _those _are _your _words of affirmation. “I’ll take care of it.”
That’s your big love song, your poetry, your vow. That you’ll take care of me.
And I feel then in that moment like such a fool for not understanding how your way of loving me interfaces with my own.