The Cyborg

I cannot ignore it any longer- my wife is a cyborg.  Rest easy: knowing this does not make me love her any less, which I think is noble.  I should have known this a long time ago; perhaps on some level I did. For whatever reason, the fact that she could live a happy life never eating anything besides ramen noodles, spaghetti o’s, bologna and Cheetos didn’t make me suspicious. Nor did the fact that when she gets sick she doesn’t slow down. I honestly don’t remember the last time she took a sick day; she has gone in a bit late or come home early, but I don’t believe she has ever in her life spent a day in bed.  And she finished law school and passed the bar exam while enduring personal hardships that would have beaten many, many humans. Yes, many have been the times when I have said or thought, “That woman is a machine.”  But I never meant it literally until today. See I always shower after her (when I shower at all) and I usually remember to turn the heat down before jumping in. This morning I turned the shower on but forgot to adjust the heat.  The steam that poured out of the cracks on the shower door should have alerted me, but didn’t. I stepped into the shower like an innocent lamb- and very nearly died. My skin molted, my hair fell out. My cherry tomatoes stewed (if you catch my drift).  I could feel my brain beginning to liquefy (luckily the damage seems to have been contained to that part of my brain that I killed in the decade between my 17^th and 27^th birthdays).  And this all went down in the few seconds it took me to turn the temp down! I doubt I would have survived 20 more seconds; forget a whole shower.  Yet somehow my wife does it every morning. A titanium interior sheathed in some high-tech skin is the only explanation. Either that or she is tougher than me.  Right- cyborg it is.