Another Sleepless Night
How do you grieve beside someone who already let go?
Another sleepless night, another collapse during the day.
My body has been coping the only way it knows how: shutting down mid-thought, surrendering to exhaustion in the bed we still share —
the same bed where our marriage is quietly dying.
Today I fell asleep for hours.
Not restfully, not peacefully.
Just... disappeared.
Because being awake in this reality felt unbearable.
And in the dreams?
We were still us.
Still joking. Still gentle. Still entwined.
Still pretending the ending hadn’t already begun.
But I woke up where she left me.
In a pile of burnt down hopes and fractured dreams.
There’s a cycle repeating in me.
Not one of abandonment by presence — but by emotion.
That subtle, soul-splintering kind of absence that makes you question whether the person beside you was ever really there at all.
I see it now — more clearly than I ever wanted to.
Franzi, who I loved completely, has been slipping away from me long before this rupture.
And maybe, in some ways, she was never able to fully meet me from the beginning.
When I wrote my first book — The Thread Between Worlds —
something in me shifted.
Suddenly, Michelle’s presence stirred in me again. Not as a fantasy. Not as a “what if.” But as a mirror to the places in me Franzi never touched.
Or couldn’t.
Or wouldn’t.
That book pulled a thread I had buried — the one that said:
You are not too much. You are not unloveable in your bigness, your dreaming, your grief.
But by then, Franzi was already flinching at the weight of me.
Not physically — never that.
But emotionally. Spiritually.
I’ve always been told I’m too intense.
Too unstable.
Too tender.
Too dreamer.
Too much.
But I was also the one who believed most in forever.
In true love.
In the kind of partnership where even storms could be weathered if the love was real enough.
Fairytales, maybe.
But the kind I lived by.
So when she said years ago,
“What’s wrong with just until the end of our lives?”
I should have felt the thread fray then.
But I didn’t.
I just wrapped her in every ounce of devotion I had and called it love.
Because I believed she believed in it too.
The grief I’m holding now isn’t just over the end of our marriage.
It’s over the illusion of who I thought she was.
And worse — who I thought I was to her.
I thought I was magnetic.
Safe.
Chosen.
I thought our love was mutual in its depth.
Now I look at her — and I don’t recognize the woman who once said yes to me in Denmark.
Not because she’s cruel.
But because I think she stopped seeing me long before I realized I was fading in her eyes.
And still… I love her.
That hasn’t gone.
Most of me still wants to protect her, to comfort her, to hold onto something.
Because I know — with all my broken heart —
that she loved me in the only way she knew how.
She tried to keep me safe. She tried to hold the life we built.
But she did it by managing me.
By soothing instead of confronting.
By avoiding truth when I was begging for it.
What I needed wasn’t peace at any cost —
it was honesty, even if it hurt.
Even if it meant collapse.
Even if it meant saying: “I don’t love you like you love me.”
There’s no room here for clean arguments or rage.
She’s never been able to hold my voice when it rises, even in desperation.
So now I hold silence —
to protect her
and to keep myself from unraveling again in front of the one person
who can no longer hold me.
It’s hopeful, dreaming Alex who’s dying now.
The one who believed love would always find its way back.
The one who thought real love could outstay pain.
The one who believed he was loveable as he was.
And the dreams this morning?
Scrambled.
Fleeting emotions more than story.
Like my soul trying to whisper back to me through static.
There is no neat ending here.
Only a man trying to write from inside the ache.
Only a body trying to breathe while sleeping beside the ghost of a love
that once felt eternal.
If you’re grieving beside someone still physically near but emotionally gone —
you’re not alone.
Some nights, survival is the post.
Some nights, that’s enough.