Soapbox

Emergency room
after the worst of the emergency and the breath-stealing fear has passed,
has moved into the numbing hours of waiting and seeing.
He is returning, slowly, to himself, to me,
bruised brain trying to cope as he re-enters the world in such an inhuman place
with no memory of getting there.

He shifts restlessly in the narrow bed as people come and go
trying to sleep through the cacophony of life and death outside the door.
I have only a straight-backed chair- I try sleeping with
my head against the wall, cushioned by a few towels
I am awakened every few minutes by the buzzing of an alarm down the hall,
his murmur of discomfort when he moves,
or my head slipping sideways to a ridiculous angle.
I lean forward, daub his wounds again,
he asks again if I know how his crash happened,
I assure him again that I don't, wasn't there.

After a while I try sleeping on the floor instead
but it's too cold down there, too loud, too alien even for my exhaustion to overcome.
At 3 AM we are both startled out of miserable dozing
by the shouts of a woman in the next room
who swallowed a half-dozen bags of heroin
and now objects to the manner in which they are re-emerging.
As she yells invectives at the police officers watching from the hallway
and they call back with mock-friendly encouragement for her efforts,
he sees that I am awake,opens his arms one more time,
beckons as he has before, "Come here".
This time I relent.

Afraid to disturb his many tubes and leads
I have him roll gingerly on his side and  slip in behind him on the blood-speckled sheets,
snuggle tight against his almost unscathed back.
Through the mingled smells of injury and antiseptic and hospital linens,
the scent of him, the warmth of him, the undeniable "home-ness" of him
overcomes everything, and we both sigh, and let go
and, impossibly, we sleep, deeply.
Because after so many years,
even with the beeping monitors and the metal bed frame under my hip,
the endless gurneys rolling down the hall and the wise-cracking cops…
in each others arms is still the best, safest place we know.