Rose Marie

There is Rose Marie.

I won't tell the story of how we met, because that belongs to us. We crossed paths at a conference. Period. The rest is ours.

What I will tell, however, is what her presence did. Because it's inexplicable, and it's true.

During those months of adjustments, fatigue, nausea, symptoms that nobody really understood, there was one constant I eventually noticed: every time I talked with Rose Marie, it all disappeared. The fatigue faded away. The nausea stopped. The difficulties became distant, almost abstract. This is not a figure of speech, this is not a romantic metaphor, this is a clinical observation I make with the rigor of an engineer and the honesty of a patient: her voice, her presence, her existence in my life had a therapeutic effect that nothing in the pharmacopoeia can replicate.

I have no scientific explanation. I could invoke dopamine, oxytocin, the effect of emotional connection on the autonomic nervous system, and all of that would probably be partly true. But the truth is that some things go beyond what science knows how to measure. When someone does you that much good, when their mere existence makes the world more bearable, when she turns a day of fog into something luminous, you don't look for an explanation. You say thank you.

What I want to say here, and I need to say it, is thank you.

Thank you for arriving at a time when everything was still under construction.

Thank you for not being afraid of the fog, the nausea, the days when I wasn't at my best.

Thank you for seeing who I was, not what I was going through.

Thank you for choosing to stay when staying wasn't simple, when it would have been easier not to commit.

Thank you for making me feel better without trying to fix me.

Thank you for making the bad days bearable by your mere presence, without asking unnecessary questions, without dramatizing, without minimizing, just by being there.

Thank you for laughing with me when things were funny and for holding my hand when they weren't.

Thank you for accepting the device under the skin, the cable in the neck, the scars on the skull, and for never looking at any of it with anything other than tenderness.

Thank you for never being afraid of what I am, electrodes included.

Thank you for listening, on the evenings when the swaying wouldn't stop, the evenings when I didn't know if it would ever pass, the evenings when the only thing that stood firm in my perception of the world was your voice on the other end of the line.

Thank you for understanding what even the doctors didn't always understand: that it wasn't in my head, that it wasn't anxiety, that it was real, and that the simple act of believing me was already a relief.

Thank you for putting up with the trips back and forth to Paris for the adjustments, the fatigue that followed, the days when I came back drained and the days when I came back with a tenth of a milliamp more and a smile less.

Thank you for not needing me to be at my best to want to be with me.

Thank you for loving the wobbly cyborg, under construction, not yet finished, and for loving him as he was.

Thank you for knowing when to push and when to let things be.

Thank you for having that intelligence of the heart that no book can teach and that makes certain people know exactly what you need before you even know it yourself.

Thank you for giving meaning to the word "after." Before you, the post-surgery period was a convalescence. With you, it became a future.

Thank you for teaching me to see myself differently. For thirty-five years, I saw myself through the filter of what didn't work, what trembled, what was missing. You looked at me with eyes that saw something else, and eventually, I began to see what you saw.

Thanks to you, for the first time, I look at myself with pleasure, with gratitude, and with pride.

Thank you for existing, Rose Marie.

In a previous post, I wrote that after the surgery, my life was complete. That the hardest part was behind me and that everything that came after was a bonus. I meant it sincerely. What I didn't know was that the bonus could be more beautiful than everything that had come before. I had survived the most difficult part, I had made peace with my limitations, I was ready to live with what I had.

And then you arrived, and what I had became infinitely more than what I had hoped for.

In December 2025, I was blessed beyond measure when Rose Marie became my fiancée, and my heart endlessly thanks life for this joy.

I have nothing to add. It's the most beautiful sentence I've ever written.

Thank you, hun. <3