38
Wrinkles Ben Ashby
For a bit over a year now, I’ve had the privilege of being in love. It’s ridiculous to say, but every moment of every day is made more colorful because she’s in my life, though we spend most of those moments apart. I can’t stop dreaming about the future, wondering what it might be like to spend bits of every day with her, full of long walks and babies falling out of clouds. In one of those moments, I wrote Timber a poem: I think I’d like to see your wrinkles To watch crinkles at the corner of your eye become folds in the sun celebrating the giant forehead creases you’ll get from laughing too much. To grow old and crooked together pretending to be grumpy when our grandkids aren’t around knowing you so closely that I discover your wrinkles before anyone else. I think your wrinkles will be beautiful. This was what I envisioned love to be like; two people becoming entirely familiar with each other, with beauty and quirks giving way to poor eyesight and early dinners over the course of decades. It’s a touching description of love, but through my time in the hospital, I’m realizing it may not paint the full picture. Here’s a bit of what I mean: I met Adonis in the pediatric ICU. He was diagnosed with neuroblastoma at three months. His parents hadn’t finished decorating his room in their new rental home before he was whisked back to the hospital, maybe to never come home again. They prayed that his cancer, a type known for granting miracles, would wish itself away, but there was a fear that it would kill him. I met Mary, a 40-year-old woman with metastatic cervical cancer. She’d gotten married the year before, two years after her diagnosis. She and her husband knew full well at the wedding that she was going to die. Their marriage revolved around her day-by-day decline in health. She’d been so sick for the last three months that they’d not even gotten to share a kiss. I met Josh, a man who has had fifteen abdominal surgeries since 2000. He lived with a bladder bag and a bowel bag. He was morbidly obese, his hair was greasy and thin, and he was too tired to speak in full sentences. He fell in love in 1995: five good years, followed by nineteen where his wife
