It is three in the morning and I cannot sleep. I am hungry and cannot eat. Deep in the pit of my belly there is a fury rumbling and I know by this time tomorrow night, it will be at fever pitch and I will claw at myself to make it stop. I will scream at the voices ricocheting through my brain and I will beat myself senseless and nothing will stop the yawning dark from swallowing me. My already nervous hands pick at pieces of lint in perpetuity. Every month there is new lint to discard, new limits to test. My bones ache down to the marrow and already I want to split myself open and suck it out to quiet the feverish quake rattling across my skin. My hair stands on end, prickles my flesh, causes me to clench and unclench all the muscles in my body in a sick, disturbed rhythm that makes me feel like I'm seizing instead of gaining control.

Upstairs she sleeps and downstairs I sit pressed to the wall, in a corner, pressed between two walls, trying to force myself through the plaster. The dry wall. What are these walls made of? I turn my head, my lips brushing the cool surface, a brief kiss and then a taste. It's bitter and that bitterness bites its way down my esophagus and into my stomach where it seeps into my blood stream and fills me.

In the kitchen, there is food. The remnants of dinner. The smell lingers in the air, absorbed by the fibers of our life together. I inch forward on shaking hands and shaking knees, my body already weary, already dreading the snapping pulling breaking stretching distorting that could come if so much as my little toe slips into that cool, silvery sliver of night light. Not tonight. Tomorrow night. And with a nod, I use the wall to steady myself as I rise to my feet.

She finds me in the morning, huddled and cold and wide awake from mental hysteria beside the table. My eyes close as she presses her warm, soft palms to my forehead, my cheeks, my neck, my chest. It is like the day after, only it is now the day of and I must endure, and subject her to, all of this times a thousand. Her kisses are light as feathers, light like rain on my eyelids and chin and lips, her fingers lost in my hair or pushing into my shoulders. I wish she would strip off her clothing, strip off mine, and press all of herself to me because it will be the only thing that grounds me, that ties me to my human form. I force my eyes open, catch a flash of pink as she stands, and her feet pad along by my head as she conjures and charms and makes things calm and ready for her broken husband.

I urge myself to my feet, stagger to the chair she has pulled back for me, and sink back down to rest my elbows on the table. She appears again with those soft hands and her kisses, pressing them into my skin like she's making impressions that won't ever leave - soft curves and heat and delicate lines, all over my face, along my jaw, on the tip of my nose. I can't kiss her back and she knows it but the feral twitch of my hands makes me wish that I could.