My wife was fast asleep beside me… Suddenly, in the drifting fog of night, my phone blinked with a Facebook notification, and a woman floated into my digital world, asking to be added as a friend.
So, with the strange logic only dreams have, I accepted her request.
I messaged herDo we know each other?
She replied, as if whispering through a wall of forgotten years: I heard you got married, but I still love you.
She was someone from a life before this one, her photograph sparkling strangely on the screenbeautiful, caught in a beam of unnatural light.
I closed the chat and stared at my wife, softly breathing under the duvet, lost in the hush after her long day at work.
Watching her, I wondered at how peacefully she slept, cocooned in this unfamiliar house we called home. So far now from her childhood rooms in Manchester, where, in another dream, she was always surrounded by her familyher mother there to offer a warm lap and gentle words if she needed to cry, her siblings stirring laughter into the air, her father returning from work with small tokens of love, and trust like an invisible blanket tucked around them.
All these drifting thoughts washed over me, so I picked up my phone and pressed BLOCK, the word echoing in the silent, uncanny glow.
Turning to face her, I slid back into the gentle shadow of sleep.
I am a husband, not a boy. I have given my word, and I will keep it. I will always work to be a man whose wife is never betrayed, whose family never splintersa quiet vow echoing through the nonsense and wonder of dreams.
