He got used to seeing you; he got used to feeling your presence against his back in bed and turning over to see your fall of t

He got used to seeing you; he got used to feeling your presence against his back in bed and turning over to see your fall of tangled red hair across the pillow. You never said much but somehow you never had to – that's how it went. It was a love that was medicated with heavy mood stabilizers and Ambien-induced sleep. It was a love that was so languid that it never had to make excuses for bad habits or towels left on the floor; never had to explain why the bread was left out or the dishwasher unemptied. It never made those excuses because there just wasn't any point.

Instead, he held you at night, whatever shell that the medication offered him, and you fell asleep to his rhythmic breathing and the heat against your neck. You felt him spooned against your back, holding you safe against whatever nightmares.

Because he was always there, you felt it would always be enough.

He tried so hard. In the past, you would have doubted his loyalty to this marriage. There was too much joking and not enough listening; there were fights that lasted hours and ended in rough sex with your head hard against the headboard of the bed and your hands clenched on his shoulders.

It took a night of completely passionless sex for you to realize how committed he was to you and to everything else. And because the numbness was so foggy; you were drowning in numbness although you knew somewhere inside you loved him back, you didn't have the feelings left to cry when he came and you didn't; when he bowed his head to you and you felt like pulling away.

He was committed – is committed.

You knew that you had the power to pull through it as the months passed and he was there every time you needed him. You knew that somehow life would go on.

You knew it, yes – but knowing isn't always truth.

The day the stick turned blue, it all came rushing back. Depression-drugged or not, you sank to your knees and let it clatter to the floor, spattering a little on the tile, the mushy end.

The knowing was replaced by failure, and leaning over, you threw up for the first time in four months and cursed the God that wouldn't let you fucking be.

Running the race
Like a mouse in a cage
Getting nowhere but I'm trying
Forging ahead
But I'm stuck in the bed
That I made so I'm lying

He lies in the cold bed and blinks at the ceiling; he could have the whole fucking world on his side and it still wouldn't change things. He's angry at you and he's angry at himself and the world that makes things so damn hard sometimes. But none of it really matters, because things are the way they are.

He'd pulled a twenty-four hour shift at the hospital the night before; you were still working but you had the night off. The day had been hard; he had had several cheeky interns and a lot of complications with the surgery, but he had looked forward to coming home and telling you about his success. He'd saved and stabilized the patient, and both of you know that it's the little things that count sometimes when the rest of life is shit.

But when he got home, you weren't standing at the stove cooking dinner. You weren't stirring a pot of sauce or chopping radishes and carrots for a salad. And he felt unnaturally angry; it was the stress and it was the fact that he was built up about telling you about his day and you weren't there. You were balled up under the covers on the bed, in a drug-induced sleep, and he got angry. He got angry, and it was a mistake, but he's human and the constant stream of support and worry takes its toll.

He had picked up a Thai takeout menu and reached for the phone before his hand stopped in mid-air. And without thinking it through, without stopping to compose himself and rationalize his temper, he had headed for the stairs.

He would come to regard this as a mistake later on.

But if you keep real close
Yeah, you stay real close
I will reach you

I'm down to a whisper
In a daydream on a hill
Shut down to a whisper
Can you hear me still

You have to take a moment, between his decision to address the problem out of anger and the walk to the stairs. Looking back on it, treating a fragile wife as the person she used to be was not a good idea. Medication gave you both a false sense of security; it added a fake normalcy to something that wasn't, and never would be, the same again.

If you had seen the medication as something to help you; if he had seen the stopgap in the marriage as a break, as something to rebuild your relationship, the situation would have been different. The love was there – it was always there.

But maybe he wasn't attuned enough and maybe you were so lost in your personal hell that you didn't see it slipping from you.

Either way, the moment for reconsideration passed, like a whisper in a room full of voices.

Eager to please,
Trying to be what they need
But I'm so very tired
I've stopped trying to find
Any peace in my mind
Because it tangles the wires

He swung the door open; your eyes had fluttered open. Always a light sleeper, you used to suffer from insomnia, and the SSRIs were like soft pillows, pressing your head down. The sleep is like a blanket that covers everything; you don't have to deal with anything in deep, dreamless sleep.

He had put a warm hand on your shoulder. "Addison?"

"Mm?" Your eyes had struggled to stay open; you were so tired. "Mark?" You'd coughed once, twice. "What time is it?"

"It's six pm, Addie." He'd sighed. "Have you gotten up at all today?"

You were wearing a crumpled pajama shirt and soft mint-green fleece pants. "I guess not."

He frowned and you frowned back, feeling a faint stirring of annoyance. "Why is that a problem? It's my day off."

"And maybe I wanted to come home and talk to my wife after my work day?" He didn't mention dinner, but you caught the implication in his voice and now the anger had risen to just under the surface.

"What, so essentially, Mark, you wanted the little woman to have a hot meal for her man when he came home from working so hard?" You had heard the whine in your voice, that tone that you hate and that had become a part of you.

His eyes had ignited. "I didn't say that, Addison."

"But that's what you want, right?" You struggled up, out of bed, feeling your feet hit the coolness of the rug and feeling your back pop from being in one place all day. "You wish that I was back to normal – you wish that I wasn't like this."

"Of course I wish that. Don't be stupid. It's not an insult to you."

His voice had been so dismissive, so incredibly uncaring, that you'd snapped.

"Yes, a perfect wife, right, Mark? A wife that can make you dinner and be a successful surgeon and keep a clean house? A wife that doesn't need medication to be normal, who doesn't cry at night or faint in the middle of surgery?"

He winced, opened his mouth to stop your tirade of words, but you pressed on – and your decision to do so unraveled it all.

"A wife that can bear your children without a rotten womb that makes her lose them. That's what you want, right, Mark?"

And time had stopped.


But if you keep real close
Yeah, you stay real close
I will reach you

I'm down to a whisper
In a daydream on a hill
Shut down to a whisper
Can you hear me
Can you hear me still

His face had fallen; his lower lip had actually quivered, and you wanted to take the words back. Because you knew that it wasn't true. It hadn't been true for ages – he had been someone who loved you; your other half, your soulmate and the person who cared about you most. You'd felt it in his eyes, in his words, in the way he'd stroked your hair and made you food (and learned to cook at that); how he'd turned from Mark who couldn't show his emotions well to Mark who would give anything to have the Addison he knew and loved just by his side and starting to get better. You'd wounded him and now you were going to see his tears and instead of feeling triumphant, you felt a mixture of anger, pain and regret.

And he hadn't cried. His face had hardened. And he'd said, in a low voice:

"If you can't tell the difference between annoyance and anger, Addison; if you can't tell the difference between me wanting you to be okay for you firstly and for both of us secondly and me being selfish, then what the hell are we doing here? What are we fighting for?"

And you'd shrugged, powerless in your pajamas and tangled hair, and then began to cry.

And instead of staying to comfort you this time, he'd just left. Because we have a breaking point. Because we sometimes just can't. And he loves you and has loved you and is ready to lay down his life for you, but you keep pushing him away.

There was no sound from the bedroom after that; he sat with a container of cold rice pilaf and a hunk of Cheddar cheese and tried not to listen to your stumbling; your tears, the retches into the toilet.

Because when you try everything, what's left to do? How do you cure desperation? How do you break through something you thought was getting better, but ended up being a farce?

The sound tires on my lips
To fade away into forgetting

He'd slipped out of the house when he heard no more sounds from above. He'd slipped out for a run; to feel the cold spring air on his face (the coldest spring in one hundred years; yeah, well, he knew it better than most) and to feel the air tear his lungs so that he could feel something besides masked worry for a change.

The run was liberating. He ran out the worry; he ran out the sick slump of his stomach when you woke up crying in the night; when you refused to eat. He ran out the days of sleeping; the dead eyes in the corridors of Mt. Sinai, the way your red hair lost its luster and your face puffed up from the medication, but that he knew inside he loved you anyway because you were still Addison and you were beautiful under all your pain.

He ran it out and he ran it hard and ended up coughing gobs of metallic phlegm into the wet grass outside of the park, but when he came back, the mist in a fine shower on his face and in his hair, he felt better. Calmer. Ready to help you. Ready to recharge and to be who you needed. Ready to hear your whispers in place of the old fiery screams.

I'm down to a whisper
In a daydream on a hill
Shut down to a whisper

He'd pushed open the door; he'd climbed the stairs again. On his eyes was the picture of you crumpled in bed and he could feel your heat in his arms again; he could feel you taking his comfort to yourself and healing. He knew that he could start the healing again.

What he didn't know is that you had deemed it too late for that. What he found was the note hastily scribbled on the pillow that still held the indent of your head.

And what he did, instead of holding you; instead of making you a meal, of being the husband you wanted – what he did instead was bow his head so low that his neck cracked and close his eyes in defeat.

And two tears dropped into your footprint on the rug; it was forgotten, now. All that was left was the barest hint of your presence in the room.

Can you hear me
Can you hear me still