"...he understood now what adult love could be. Something where two people did not merge so completely that they had trouble figuring out where one ended and the other began, but rather the joining of two strong, separate beings, creating a future rather than trying, over and over, to redo the past...."

"Of course it had all been bullshit." ~Eleven Hours, Pamela Erens

This is a beautiful book. I was too sad and upset today to go to work, called sick to read. (Reading, where I go when there is no other way out, as my shrink observes, makes admirable use of my coping skills - they look just like talents.) The story is about a woman in labor and her nurse. The father of the child cheated on the woman and she took her fetus and left him. She escapes the birthing room and wanders alone around the hospital, remembering him in the nearness of other men when they pass her, savoring her lonliness that she has grown used to. But she has this nurse to consider. To help her. Who will not leave her alone ever again after that.

 "“I need to know that you are all right at all times," says the nurse." Ah! Lore is ashamed! That you are all right. At all times. Lore has been uncooperative, ungrateful! Who else has made this offering to her—that you are all right at all times? Who else has taken this on as their duty?"

 I find the story very moving, and well wrought, the medical details, hospital smells, glimpses of lives through doorways. So I keep reading. Though it is occasioning unfortunate feelings of self-pity. I can't help reflecting that in my world, there is no nurse. Even if I were to need it, especially if I were to need it, there would be nowhere and nobody to whom I could run to care or shelter me. No matter how deep the cut, I will save myself somehow or bleed out.