yesss!

you know those moments when you can relate to something? to someone? those "ah ha" moments that make you feel like you're not the only weirdo out there?

i experienced that moment today while reading when you are engulfed in flames by david sedaris. this particular passage sank deep in my heart and sent chills down my spine as i totally and completely connected with the type of love he was describing. it was david and his boyfriend, hugh, playing the parts of me and g, respectively. it was craaazy true, albeit remotely disgusting. but this is love.

"...'what do you say we lance that thing?' he said. it's the sort of question that catches you off guard. 

'did you just use the verb to lance?' i asked.

he turned on the light. 'since when did you learn to lance boils?' 

'i didn't,' he said. 'but i bet i could teach myself.'

with anyone else i'd put up a fight, but hugh can do just about anything he sets his mind to. this is a person who welded the plumbing pipes in his house in normandy, then went into the cellar to make his own cheese. there's no one i trust more, and so i limped to the bathroom, that theater of home surgery, where i lowered my pajama bottoms and braced myself against the towel rack, waiting as he sterilized the needle.

'this is hurting me a lot more that it's hurting you,' he said. it was his standard line, but i knew that this time he was right. worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it, a horrible custard streaked with blood. what got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable and unlike anything i had come across before. it was, i thought, what evil must smell like. how could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside of him? and so much of it! the first tablespoon gushed out on its own power, like something from a geyser. then hugh used his fingers and squeezed out the rest. 'how are you doing back there?' i asked, but he was dry-heaving and couldn't answer.

when my boil was empty, he doused it with alcohol and put a bandage on it, as if it had been a mior injury, a shaving cut, a skinned knee, something normal he hadn't milked like a dead cow. and this, to me, was worth at least a hundred of the hundred and twenty nights of Sodom. back in bed i referred to him as Sir Lance-a-Lot...."

i won't get into the details of how i totally understand this story, in an effort to keep this post bearable. but i will say this: thank goodness for the "sir lance-a-lot's" in our lives.