My wife was asleep beside me… Then, suddenly, in the hazy glow of the night, my phone chimed with a Facebook notification. A woman had asked to be added. The screen pulsed strange blue light and I, propelled by some half-remembered memory, tapped accept.
Her message floated into my inbox, disjointed as dreams often are: Do we know each other? I typed, unsure if the pixels were real.
She replied almost instantly: I heard you got married, but I still love you.
Her face, familiar yet distant, looked beautiful in her photograph; it felt as if she hovered both in the past and between the folds of sleep. I closed the chats window and glanced at my wifeEmma, peaceful and still, wrapped in soft blankets after a wearying day at work.
The room was filled with shadows, but somehow I knew she felt safe, curled close in our new cottage far from her childhood home in Cornwall. Once, her world was constant laughter, teasing from her brother, silly impressions from her sister, endless cups of tea with her mum when she cried, and her father bringing home her favourite scone after work. Now, here she was, trusting me entirely, in a land where the moon shifts shapes and the walls whisper her name.
A rush of odd, swirling thoughts pressed at my mind like fog on the moors. With a slow, dreamy movement, I picked up my phone and pressed BLOCK, sealing away the ghost of old loves with a single touch.
I turned toward Emma, the warmth of the quilt wrapping us together, and drifted back into sleep.
I am a husband, not a child, and my promise to her is my truth. Even as the night twists reality into peculiar shapes, I vow to stay loyal, fighting off the wild, dreamlike urges, and remain the sort of man whose loyalty holds his family together, no matter how surreal the night may grow.
