She was the perfect woman.
I have no idea how I managed to catch her attention.
Our relationship, our marriage, it was all perfect, except for one thing that neither of us could have foreseen.
We met in college. She was working towards her English degree while I was studying Business. My major required me to take an English course, as did hers, and we found ourselves in the same class. When she asked if the desk next to mine was taken, I was almost too stunned to answer. Cathy was beautiful in that artless way that some women have, and she smiled as I fumbled over my answer. That would have been the end of it for most people, I had fumbled my one chance, but Cathy wasn’t like other women. She told me later that she had found it endearing, and Cathy suspected she was already a bit taken with me when she asked to sit down.
“When I saw you from across the room, I just knew I wanted to get to know you better.”
We talked a little before class, comparing schedules and going over the usual getting to know you chit-chat. When the teacher arrived and class began, I found myself snatching little glances at her as she bent over her notebook. She caught me looking once, and, to my surprise, I saw her smile at me. I was smitten after that smile, and when Cathy invited me to lunch after class, I didn’t even have to think about it.
We were dating a week later, and as we got closer, I should have noticed the warning signs of the problems to come.
I suppose I understand how it escaped my notice, though.
Few people would have considered utter peace and pure relaxation a problem.
When we walked hand in hand, I would get this feeling of utter peace throughout my body. When we kissed, I felt like nothing in this world could hurt me. She made me feel safe, made my problems melt away, and I knew that I wanted more than the few hours we enjoyed each week. Her college schedule made it difficult to go out more than twice a week, and my own class load kept me busy too. Part of the reason we had such little time together, though, was Cathy’s commute to and from school.
Cathy lived an hour and a half from campus and couldn’t begin to afford an apartment on her meager student income. The job I worked, plus the leftover grant money I had at the end of the semester, paid the rent on my studio apartment but not much else. Another person paying rent was nice, but I couldn’t say it was the only reason I invited her to live with me. I also wanted her close to me. She made me feel good, made me feel safe. Being in her presence made the dark world in which I lived more tolerable, and I wanted that for more than just a few hours a week.
I offered to let her move in, and after a week of mulling it over, she agreed.
That weekend, we combined our meager possessions, and I slept like a baby with her in my arms.
As we began to spend our evenings together, the problems became more apparent.
Problems is a terrible word for it because, in the beginning, it was more like a godsend.
When we sat on the couch, our hands linked, I would find myself getting drowsy. When we would cuddle on the couch, our bodies pressed together, I would lose minutes at a time as my eyes grew heavier and heavier. The feeling of peace that I found in her presence put me at ease, and that ease led to some of the best sleep of my life. I would sleep more deeply than I ever had before and wake up after eight hours refreshed and ready to start my day.
Cathy seemed pleased with the attention, she’d only been with one other person before we started dating, but I could tell that she wondered why I hadn’t slept with her yet. Some woman’s feelings would have been hurt by this, but Cathy had been raised in a very religious household and must have assumed I was simply waiting till marriage. The truth was that I would have loved to sleep with her, but sleeping was the problem.
Whenever we got close, my arms around her and our bodies pressed together, I would find myself blinking and suddenly losing long periods of time. Sometimes she would lead me to bed. Sometimes she would just sleep with me on the couch. Either way, I would always wake up next to Cathy with a deep feeling of fulfillment. I had assumed that she was feeling the same way. I often thought that maybe this was a feeling we gave each other, and it made me feel good to bring her the same sort of peace that she brought me.
This went on for six months, and I thought things were going well. We went out to dinner, had friends over, went on dates, and seemed to be living together with few problems. I had been tentatively looking at rings, preparing to pop the question and make it official. Besides the matter of intercourse, I thought we were happy.
Then, one evening, I came home from class to find her crying on the couch.
I hadn’t seen her that day, she’d been absent from the one class we had together, and when I’d called her, she’d said she was feeling sick. It was nothing serious. She maybe had a cold or something. I had told her to feel better, hanging up so I could leave for my next class, but as I saw her look up from her cupped hands, I knew something was definitely wrong. I had never seen her cry before, and it was so alarming that I could do little else but go to her and wrap an arm around her.
She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, but I now wish I had pressed her.
I wrapped her in my reassuring arms and tried my best to comfort her in her time of need. My reassuring arms quickly turned into drawing her close and wiping her tears. This soon led to kissing, which led to touching, and then to the bedroom.
I won’t bore you with the details, but I think you know how it ended up.
I woke up the next day, her hands lightly stroking my hair and fresh tears running down her cheeks.
It was our first time, and I couldn’t even begin to remember how it had gone.
I asked her to marry me a month later, and she seemed overjoyed.
We had been living together for half a year now, and our love for one another was pretty clear. She wore my engagement ring with pride, showing it off to all her friends, and we began to plan our wedding. I was too blind to see that she was making appointments with a campus therapist more often than she used to. I was too comfortable to notice the tears that sometimes came to her while we lay in bed together. I was too wrapped up in my own feelings to notice the prescriptions that appeared in the medicine cabinet. I was just….so comfortable that I never wanted it to end.
It’s easy to get tunnel vision when you spend all your time in the tunnel of love.
After that first time, however, I did make efforts to be better in the bedroom. Cathy was patient with me, seeing that I was trying, but I often found myself “trying” one moment and waking up the next. She was always quick to reassure me that it was nothing to be ashamed about, but I knew it hurt her deeply to have a partner incapable of being intimate with her.
So, I set out to find the reason for my sleeping fits.
I began to make doctor’s appointments of my own. I said that the appointments were for her benefit, but I was honestly more concerned that I might have a real problem brewing. The last thing I wanted to discover at twenty-two was that I was a narcoleptic or had a problem with my brain or something. I explained what was happening to my doctor, and he was helpful, if not a little dismissive. “A kid your age shouldn’t be having any sort of problem in that department, but we’ll get you checked out,” he assured me with a smile and a pat on the shoulder. I was tested for every sleep disorder imaginable. I was given prescriptions of my own, but none of them seemed to work. I took supplements, signed up for new drugs that had just hit the market, and joined medical test groups.
Despite it all, though, no one seemed to have any answers for what was going on.
I was just so comfortable with my fiance that I couldn’t help but fall asleep in her arms.
It would have been sweet if it wasn’t worrying me to no end.
We had decided on March for our wedding, the first anniversary of our meeting, and I was determined to make it special for her.
I was as helpful and dutiful as a boyfriend/fiancee could be. I went with her through every stage of the planning. I picked out cake toppers, helped with seating charts, picked out the menu, visited and put a deposit down on the venue, and comforted my soon-to-be wife every step of the way.
The saving grace, of course, was that I could put my performance issues down to pre-wedding jitters as the day crept closer and closer.
The wedding was easily the happiest day of my life.
I stood at the altar, sweating into my rented tux, waiting for the moment that she would arrive. The crowd huddled behind me in a murmuring throng of excited tension, and it felt like a thousand years had passed before the music began from the organist. When I saw her in her dress, gliding down the aisle like a dream, I fell in love with her all over again. She was so beautiful, her tears now ones of joy, and I never regretted asking her to join her life to mine. We exchanged rings, spoke vows of eternal love, and then walked from the church as husband and wife.
As we stood for pictures, the venue having set up the lawn to host our reception, I made ready to fulfill my end of tonight.
I drank champagne for the toasts and black coffee by the cup. I took caffeine supplements before we climbed into the car and left for our honeymoon suite. As she went into the bathroom to take off her dress, I walked around and tried my best to keep my heart racing. I told myself over and over again that tonight would be different, that tonight would pay for all the rest. I wanted nothing but to make her feel special and to make tonight one to remember.
When she came out of the bathroom, the two of us standing before each other as husband and wife, I felt like I was possessed with all the energy and serenity I would ever need.
When we woke up the next morning, entwined as we always were, there were no tears on her cheeks.
Only a look of fulfillment I knew all too well.
We settled into married life easily, and it was as though nothing had changed. Despite my best efforts, however, I couldn’t recapture the magic of that night. Whenever I was in her arms, whenever we were close, I couldn’t help but fall into that feeling of utter serenity and slip off to sleep. It was as if those feelings had multiplied after the wedding, and she made me feel like I might die of happiness. I couldn’t hold her hand as we drove anymore, lest I find myself listing off the road. If I cuddled on the couch with her to watch a movie, I would inevitably miss over half of it. I loved nothing more but to bask in that feeling of serenity that seemed to waft around her, but I also felt guilty as she seemed to return to her silent, tearful nature. I couldn’t help myself. I was powerless to resist the pull of her, and I was powerless to do anything when I was in her arms.
I began to notice as her mental health got worse, though. Cathy was moody and manic by turns. Sometimes she wanted nothing to do with me, only to cry and demand my attention as I tried to give her space. I often missed classes because I was afraid to leave her by herself, and I finally insisted that we go see her doctor. The doctors said this was normal. Her medication just needed to be adjusted. Despite their best efforts, the new pills and the adjusting of the old pills seemed to do no good. Our lovemaking was nonexistent, despite my best efforts. I tried to comfort her, tried other means of intimacy, attended couples therapy with her, and tried my best to keep her from imploding.
In the end, though, it did no good.
I remember the night it happened as vividly as I remember our wedding day. I was lying in bed, Cathy still in the bathroom, and was worried about an appointment we had the next day. They planned to try her on a new battery of pills, and Cathy seemed willing to give it a try. She had wandered around the house like a fretful ghost all day, and I had been keeping an eye on her up until this very moment. I felt like if we just got to bed if we’d just fallen into the comfortable embrace of each other’s arms, everything would be fine.
She climbed into bed, and something about her face didn’t seem right to me.
Then she opened her arms, and I was like a meteorite hurtling into a planet’s gravity.
“I love you,” she said, kissing my forehead as her heart raced against my chest, “I’ll always love you.”
I fell asleep wrapped in the arms of my love, sure that as long as I remained here, everything would be okay.
I woke up, however, to discover that I was sleeping next to a corpse.
I called the paramedics, but there was nothing they could do.
She’d been dead for hours as I slept.
Cathy had taken an overdose of sleeping pills before tucking in the night before.
It was almost an ironic end, and the note she had left on the nightstand told me everything I needed to know.
All these years, I believed I had been giving her the same feeling she had been giving me.
It turned out I was nothing but a thief in the night.
Cathy said that her mental decline had started almost the day that we met. The balance and fulfillment that I had been experiencing were a mirror to the anxiety that she was feeling. She had taken my inability to stay awake as something she was doing. She was boring me, I was disinterested, and she was failing as a woman as a result. The longer it lasted, the more she felt like she was the cause. She wanted to please me, to be a good wife, but the longer it went on, the more inadequate she felt. She loved me. She never wavered in her love for me, but being with someone who was physically uninterested in her was killing her, physically and emotionally.
She had finally decided that if sleeping next to her was what I wanted, then she would give me what I wanted.
We would both sleep soundly for a change.
I’m writing this as I sit in the viewing room of the funeral parlor. They gave me an hour before her cremation, a final viewing for her grieving husband. I can tell by the way they keep looking at me that I must look terrible. I’ve been awake for the last five days, and the bags under my eyes look like suitcases. I have become accustomed to her presence, to the way she makes me feel, and now my sleep is all but nonexistent. I’m like a junkie with no smack, and my fix lies in that box across the way, looking at lovely as she did the day we met.
I think that when I get done with this, I may climb into that simple pine box with her and see if I can find some sleep.
I can almost feel whatever she possessed from my seat here, and I want to see if she still possesses it, even in death.
Who knows, maybe I’ll pull the lid closed behind me, and they will simply slide me into the chute as well.
It seems fitting somehow that the two of us should sleep forever, two souls at rest for all time.