Under the Love Weather [a post by John]

M’girl has trouble with the words. She is very quick minded, which, apart from that condition’s many benefits, occasionally results in the piling up of three, even four phrases in her mind before she has the chance to speak any of them. Especially when she’s sleepy, this manifests as jibberish, e.g. “Wha’d you didn’t say? Ya wanna?”

In full lucidity, this cognitive bottleneck acts as a balloon that you have dutifully inflated and then let go: that is, usually, a sequence of disparate questions fired off in unanswerable succession, e.g. “Isn’t this song by ‘Coldplay?’ Whatever happened to Oasis? Don’t you wanna visit England? Isn’t Kate Middleton amAAAzing?”

Francis Matthew Schutz in his bed by Hogarth

On other occasions, though, this building up of statements necessitates her boiling down her overarching thought to a basic premise. Such was the case earlier today. --The truth is, I wasn’t doing so well last night. I was under the weather. I was running a fever, which I never run, in fact go years without running, and was shivering uncontrollably in a literal sense: sort of convulsing. Long story short, I am miserable and terrified when sick. After some losses over the past few years, I tend to catastrophise in regards to physical ailments: a charming hypochondria to which my poor girlfriend is now party. Despite the paltry nature of my low-grade (102ish… 101.6…) fever, R stayed up with me, got me medicine, fixed me up on the couch with reruns of The Office, reassured me lovingly, etc. I awoke today much better and this afternoon R took a much-deserved nap.

And I watched, through the window, while she slept, the breeze outside doing its best to usher in an early fall, here. I petted our wonderful, stupid dog. I played guitar, watched a bad horror movie, and, once in a while, looked over at R, noticing how pretty she was, bunched up with the quilt, the kitten sleeping on her hip.

In the middle of this nap, she awoke with a sort of start, looked fixedly at me, and asked, “D’j’you don’t mean nothing, you don’t?” Then, miraculously, she shook her head as if to clear it, slogging through the dozen or so questions she’d meant to ask, and reduced her query, following my bad night, to her most central concern: “Do you have everything you need, John?”

“Yes honey,” I said. “I do.”

[image via]