No human being would ever want to see another in this much pain and agony, let alone someone whom they had grown to love as deeply as Arianna had grown to love Donovan. It would be impossible for Arianna to relate to any one else who had not been in her same position what hurt more- being separated from him lying in the hospital bed in that much pain by the locked-down door and not being able to stop the screams or even to reach out and comfort him at all, or seeing through the glass window within his agony even still the Love and Deep Desire he had in his eyes for his own pain to be able to swallow up the sorrow he knew she was feeling through this all.

Donovan’s body had suffered tremendously, and would yet suffer any additional pain that could come to him, however difficult, if only it meant that the pain and heaviness in Arianna’s eyes and heart could be lifted and erased. And Arianna would just as soon have been in that hospital room under quarantine experiencing his pain for him. Thus, their highest joy in making love, their knowledge of their seperateness while at the same time being one, was in this situation the very source of their most intricate and seemingly insufferable pains.

You see, regardless of how completely you grow into “one” as a couple there yet remains that ever cruel twist of separateness that never can be combined. You yet remain two separate, distinct, individuals who experience your own reality- and as such you experience your own pains and sorrows which another could never take away from you. As much and as deeply as the one wished to be able to reach out to the other and swallow up his or her pains and take them on themselves instead, still their separateness remained, as solid and sure as the locked-down door and as clear as the glass window which now separated them. Arianna’s pain was Arianna’s pain and Donovan’s pain was Donovan’s pain, and it could never be another’s.

Through the heaviness of it all, however, the joys that they had shared together continued to shine through the darknesses of despair and warm and lift their hearts and spirits, and in those last moments right before he slipped away, lingering through the space between her heart and his, there was a Peace in that room that had penetrated through that locked-down wooden door and clear glass window; a Peace so solid and yet so fluid Only Love could have been the culprit.