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My hands leave the metal stability of the balance bars on my left and right. I step my left leg forward onto a bouncy blue half-moon shaped surface while my hands hover over the bars. “They’re there if you need them,” my physical therapist reminds me, probably because she knows I’m stubborn. We’ve been working up to me lunging like this for over a month, and I know it’s the stubborn in me that has gotten me this far.
I hold my lunge, leaning into the slight shake of my ankle and knee before switching to the other side.
“This is way harder than you made it look!” I laugh.
“Of course it is!” she quips. “When the body is injured or extremely ill like you were, it loses its sense of space. That sense is called proprioception,” she pauses, “But—of course, as a trauma therapist you already knew that.”
“I did,” I reply. “But knowing something in theory and feeling it in your body are two different things.”
I keep lunging, breathing and scrunching my face through the pain. I focus right beneath the clock on the white wall, trying hard to keep my balance for five second increments. I start to find enough stability to speak again. “It’s like after all that time in the hospital my body lost her place in space,” I say. “It was the weirdest thing. Like my body lost track of the ground, lost trust that it would hold me. And now,” I switch legs, “now, I’m finding my feet again.”
It’s seventy degrees and we’ve been seated outside, the air that perfect dry warm-cool that makes Colorado summer evenings a dessert you crave all winter. We order drinks. Me, a “Jim’s New Knees,” because of course I’m choosing a knee-themed elixir, and Ryan a “Via Ferrata.” While we wait for our drinks, I watch people as passengers, loading onto the silver train to the airport just past the fence of our patio, flying to who knows where. And all I can think is that I am glad to be here. Not going anywhere.
The sky peeking through Union Station’s canopy is a perfect shade of baby blue with fluffy clouds floating in its sea. We’re two blocks from our old apartment, that glass and chrome high rise where we brought home both Merton as a puppy and our graduate degrees. These sidewalks stretch us back in time—walking to get soup dumplings at Cho Lon, grabbing the 16th street mallride to church, biking across the Platte to REI, walking tiny Merton to the farmer’s market to get flowers and food. Today, we’ve realized, we’ve lived in Colorado Springs for just over a year, but Denver still holds part of our souls. We’re not sure what to feel about that, except that you can have a home and still miss home.
Our drinks and appetizers arrive, and after we savor every bite of crispy risotto and pancetta, I pull out the ring box from my leather backpack at my feet. We’re in Denver for the weekend celebrating our anniversary, and tonight we are exchanging new rings we picked out together. Earlier in the week, when my physical therapist asked if I had any fun weekend plans, I told her about our anniversary and the rings. She asked if it was a milestone anniversary, like our fifteenth or twentieth. It’s not a milestone, making it to fourteen years, but we’re laying one down anyway.
We need a way to say, “We are here.” We need to speak and mark what our bodies are still learning to sense and trust as true. We are no longer standing on the edge of life and death. Neither of us blamed the other for getting stuck there so long, and that is mercy, sweet as honey growing in the dark of its comb.
We meet eyes. I hold out Ryan’s ring, hammered rose gold with a sliver of moss agate, my body sensing his open hand, and I tell him the truest words I can find.
Mostly, I tell him thank you for loving me back to life.
Mostly, I make clear my commitment to do the same for him.
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