The light here in the morning is milky and thick with mosquitos.  Sunrise is an accidental event that goes by un-noticed, goes by without the slightest hint at glory.  Someone has Their Hand on the Celestial Dimmer Switch, and it just gets lighter.

My day starts in fits and spasms.  I can't just get out of bed.  I can't just transition from dreamtime to upright callous ambulation.  I'm all about lying there, normally sort of wheezing and moaning as the various nerves and muscle fibers suddenly remember their roles.  It's a painfiul sequence to observe, I guess.

Laurea will reach over and lay her hand across my arm, find my hand, squeeze.  She transmits the best of hope in that touch.  There's no pity there, no surface adulation, no light-hearted intent.  That initial touch is weighted, full of every hopeful emotion.  It's all she can do, most mornings.  Watch me writhe in crawling pain and soothe with that touch.  I get quickly reminded that I am never alone.

She goes back to sleep as I shuffle to the bedroom door and make my way to the shower.  My bathroom...we have separate bathrooms, which I recommend if you have a couple of them...is in rough shape, needs new drywall and a new shower and maybe a cleaning with a firehose-fed stream of carbolic acid.  I ignore it as much as possible; there's certainly no consrtuction in me at the moment.

The shower, if it is hot enough, shorts the pain.  The burning water interrupts the flow of signals, reaches the brain faster than the pain from my back, and I have some relief but I still gasp and yelp.

Three years of chronic problems, six months and twelve days of acute pain, quick check of where I'm at.  One the old scale of one to ten, let's call it a Today 8.  Yesterday's 8 was probably a 7 today, was something unmeasureable six months ago.  I didn't know anything about pain six months ago.

The morning shower, this routine has had the same rough choreography since my second day at the new job.  Each morning, the same thing: I'm better while the water is on, but I know as soon as it goes off I start the hard part.

My Laurea is asleep somewhat.  I wake her at times with the gasps, the lamaze breathing, the moaning.  She wakes up but doesn't say anything unless it's very bad, unless it's obvious that I've lost my momentum.  She'll offer words of support or she'll offer to help.  It is important to me that I do what I can do on my own, without intervention; this is mine, and it can remain that way.  Pain makes us selfish and self-centered.  Pain becomes the source of all motivation, pain levels determining the course and content of the day.  I write about it all the goddamn time, this pain.

Laurea is asleep as I limp to the dresser, get what clothes I can actually grab.  This is the worst, because the pain pills (if I have taken them) have not kicked in but the nerves and muscles are limber now, awake and screaming.  I can sometimes carry a shirt with one hand.

She's trying not to cry, trying not to worry herself out of a shallow slumber.  I try my best to stay as quiet as possible, but pain makes us selfish.  She'll wake up to the twilight of the closet light peeking under the door of her bathroom (she gets the master bath, which contains our closet) and hear my scrapings and mutterings and occasional curses.  She tries not to worry herself to fully awake, and can sometimes drift back to dreaming.

Shoes.  Shoes are bastards.  Way back when the spasms and the acute pain were new and sharp and cramping, back before I'd learned how to cope in any way, she watched me try and put my shoes on.  After a couple of days doing that, she wouldn't anymore.  She'd leave the room.  My expression, the instant pouring sweat, the way the pain would manifest as a shaking trembling weakness...no-one wants to see that.  Not for something as minor as putting shoes on.  Not for making dinner.  Not for walking from one side of the room to the other. If the activity were epic and heroic, yes, maybe.  But not for routine.  But she would offer her support, offer to put my shoes on.  Can you imagine?  Having someone put your shoes on?

Her eyes.  My wife's eyes are big and round, huge.  They are a pale blue green.  They contain all the compassion in the universe.  They fill with fear and love and sadness at times, but she replaces that as quick as it shows up now, she replaces it with resolve and hope.  She's happy to see me.  She drapes her body over me in bed, covers me with a passion that removes any hint of suffering.  She offers a depth of love and hope that I haven't yet found the bottom of, the end of.

There's a part of the morning where I am getting my meds and choking down two pints of water, where I am getting my wallet and keys and phone and everything else that I forget in the rush to get out the door, where I am somewhat OK.  Laurea is normally back to sleep, normally back to her dreams.  I take my pills, I finish my water, grab my stuff, and pat the dog on the head.  The sun isn't really up yet, but the sky will get brighter until the middle of the morning when the haze and clouds burn off in favor of soupy humid hot daylight.  I pack myself into my tiny car and drive to coffee.  Laurea sleeps for another hour or so if possible.

You know when you see pictures of gigantic machines, like huge steel stamping machines or giant earth movers or bandsaws that cut through thousands of years of timber in a few seconds, you see those and you just know that the machine makes all that work effortless.  The people who control those machines know their power without knowing the limits.  There may not be limits that can be found.  Sure, the damn things break down on ocassion and sure there are days when the balance isn't perfect, but these huge machines move mountains without the slightest sign of stress.

Laurea goes through her day, her ability to create and solve problems is her trade.  She spends more time buried in complex problems than most of us, spends her time on the full spectrum of lab problems from politics to logistics to lab equipment manufacture to measuring tiny electrical impulses in brain cells, in vivo.

She works with a calculated intent and intensity.  She does run into problems that defy solution, or problems that are inherently human or political or social that she cannot solve, but she is 100 percent Science while she is there.

And despite that massive load of work, despite the amount of passion and energy that forging a whole new career and life takes, despite the hours and hours of problems too hard for me to understand, she loves me.

Despite the mountain of pain and the mountain of problems that it brings, she loves me.

That simple phrase.  That effortless sentence.

In the last few months as my eyes have been slowly focusing on things outside of my self and my own ego, my own pain and struggle and strife, in the past few months I have felt that effortless love from her, and I can tell it's been there all along, and I can tell that it will be there.  And I know that it can handle any amount of trouble that we throw at it, any amount of trouble that struggling for a PhD or being engulfed in pain can muster. And it isn't something that shouts or screams for attention.  It isn't something that requires anything.  It just is.  Gigantic, deep, effortless.  Her touch, she conveys all of that fury and hope and care and everything that makes us human, everything that makes beauty, and there's no struggle there, no insistance.

I limp and crawl and make my way through this and only now acknowledge why, I voice it now, but I've known it all along.

On the 27th of July, we'll have been friends for 14 years, we'll have been married for ten.

In that time we have gone from one end of the country to the other.  We've experienced a full spectrum of good and bad.  We've been lucky.

We've had hope, and we've had each other.  And I know that, no matter how difficult things become, I can depend on her, on that love to effortlessly support me.