Current mood:

hopeful

Surprise

Je'taime.

The words took me by surprise; I thought I would never say them again. But there they were, coming out of my mouth as I tucked my wife into bed, ready to go to sleep.

Je'taime.

I wrote a poem about those words once, and how they had been turned on me; it had been during one of my last great fervent loves, the ones that burned me like fire. I was young and stupid then, and I lost myself deep inside of Abby, giving up everything in a frantic attempt just to be with her, stand next to her, press my lips to hers.

It was stupid, but it still holds a strange desire for me, tugging at me like an undertow; to let go of everything like a child and put your future entirely in the palm of one woman, resting there with the gleeful light of love and the abandonment of control.

Abby changed that. Je'taime; she taught me it was French for "I love you," and she spoke French and oh my God wasn't it glorious that she spoke French? It was. She had thin blonde hair, and puffy lips that were like kissing pillows, and breasts with wide thick nipples that were meant for sucking, and in the end it turned out that it was all a revenge scheme. She had never loved me. She was doing it to prove a point about breaking hearts, as I had broken hers months before when I first turned down her affections. She wrote me a letter from college scorning me, telling me what a fool I was, and I burned through the rage and hurt in one drunken night where my friends had to hold me up on a cold September dawn.

I threw up in the sink. They hadn't emptied it of dishes. I don't remember if I ever cleaned it.

And yet - je'taime.

The words became anathema to me, the very symbol of everything I had done wrong; from that point onward, I determined that I would never give myself so wholly to a woman again. The drunken rage had lasted a night, but the lesson had been burned into my soul - you keep yourself held tight. In love, charity is for suckers. Count the cost of each thing you give, and make sure you take equal measure. Don't let the scales tip, because eventually je'taime will come back and you'll be wondering how much you gave for how little.

And yet when I looked down at my wife tonight - her shoulder shattered in three places, facing surgery, wan and in tremendous pain that would have lesser women screaming - in the grip of mind-numbing drugs, she still looked up at me and took care of me.

"I love you," she said. "You're taking care of me. I enjoy your company, and you make me happy."

I kissed her on the forehead, lightly, and drew back. "Je'taime," I said, and was surprised to hear those words coming back to me, as if drawn from a well long forgotten.

She knew that I was unbelievably stressed - I've been working seventy-hour weeks for the past month or so, and trying to support her through everything, and just feeling stretched to extremes. And so when I tucked her in, so pale and weary from fighting the shattered bones in her shoulder, she made sure to send a beam of pure love straight from her heart to mine. Because I needed it.

"Je'taime," I said. I love you.

For the first time in years, I think I may know what the words mean.