Before my partner and I met, he’d spent a year in Iraq serving in the U.S. Army. As our relationship progressed, I discovered that he often had to take sleeping pills or drink heavily before bed in order to sleep. He slept fitfully, grinding his teeth and moving his arms and legs. Sometimes he sat bolt upright, covered in sweat and insisting that the sound of mortar rounds had awakened him.

I became familiar with the cast of characters who haunted his dreams: The small girl holding flowers who walked too close to the concertina wire hanging from his tank as they rumbled through her village. A beloved captain with blood gushing from a fatal shrapnel wound in his neck. An Iraqi man screaming as he burned alive in his car. Men my partner had killed, smoke rising from the bullet holes in their bodies.

“They ask me why,” he would whisper.

Often he couldn’t get to sleep, guilt and fear keeping him awake as he cried and yelled and moaned. I would stay awake with him: How could I leave him alone with his burden? It seemed too much for one person to carry.

Two years later, with medication and therapy from the va hospital, we are both sleeping much better. He still has bad nights sometimes, but I often fail to wake when he does. I feel guilty for sleeping, but I have come to understand that there are places within my partner that I can never touch. Whether I stay awake or not, he is alone.

Name Withheld

The man glaring back at me in the mirror looked psychotic. He was drenched in sweat, and his nose was bleeding from both nostrils, blood smearing his face and drying in his untrimmed mustache and beard. He took short, rapid breaths through clenched teeth, his bloodshot eyes open wide, his pupils dilated.

When I saw him, I raised my hands to defend myself. Then I recognized my own face, and I gripped the bathroom sink. “Why do you keep doing this to yourself, you stupid fuck?” I asked the man in the mirror. His expression slowly changed from rage to sadness.

It was four in the morning, and I had been drinking whiskey since noon the day before. At some point in the evening, I had acquired enough coke to keep me wired for several days. I’d snorted it all in several hours. Now the bleeding in my nose wouldn’t stop, and my body jerked with spasms, which I knew were not a normal side effect of cocaine. (You just never know what that junk has been cut with.) Before long I was practically having convulsions. With considerable effort, I made it to my bed, where I lay wondering if I would be awake for my death or if it would happen in my sleep.

Death passed me by that night. Eventually my spasms subsided, but the questions remained: Why did I have so little regard for my own well-being? Didn’t my life mean anything to me?

Sleep came the next day and lasted twenty-four hours. When I awoke, I made a decision to change my life.

That was seven years ago. I am a freshman at a community college and plan to get a four-year degree. The fear of failure is ever present, as are hope and determination. I do not regret the mistakes I’ve made, nor having lived the life I’ve now left behind. Like the life I live now and the life that lies ahead, it’s mine.

Name Withheld

“Your father has been gone all night, and I’m a little worried,” my mother told me early one spring morning in 1974.

“Where did he go?” I asked. My dad often went off alone when he was feeling low.

“Fishing,” she said, “down by the river at Oakland Mills.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s ok, but I’ll drive down and check.”

My husband, our two kids, and I were staying with my parents while our new home was being built. A little more than a year earlier my fifteen-year-old brother had lost a long battle with cancer. My parents’ grief was deep. My mother was able to verbalize hers, but my dad still couldn’t talk about it.

I found Dad sitting on a riverbank, holding a pole and staring into the water. The night had been cold, and he hadn’t worn a coat. I grabbed a blanket from my trunk and wrapped it around his shoulders, then sat down beside him.

“Catch anything?” I asked.

“Nah.”

“How long you been trying?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “Doesn’t matter.”

I wanted to chide him about making us worry, but it seemed irrelevant. Instead I said, “Sometimes you just need time to think.”

He didn’t reply. I could see that his cheek was wet. We sat there watching the sunrise reflected in the water. A hawk flew over and let out a call.

“Think we’ll have fish for breakfast?” I asked.

“Nah.”

“How about eggs?”

“You cooking?”

“Sure.”

“OK then, let’s go.”

Kathy Wiley
Mount Pleasant, Iowa

Two weeks after I graduated from college, my favorite professor invited me to her house for dinner. Katherine cooked the only dish she made well: sliced lamb and mushrooms in a white cream sauce. When we’d finished, she exhaled and said, “I’m going to kill myself now.”

I laughed, thinking she was joking. The dinner was her thank-you to me for helping her through her most recent hospital stay for depression and substance abuse: she’d overdosed on prescription pills.

But Katherine wasn’t laughing. “Life sucks,” she muttered.

She was forty-six years old, spoke three languages, and had tenure at one of the finest colleges in the country. But at that moment she sounded like a bored thirteen-year-old, and I told her so. (I was twenty-two; I knew everything.)

Katherine rubbed her hand over her face, then hauled herself up from the table. “I’ll be in my study,” she said.

I remembered the first time I had attended one of her classes. She’d held up a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and asked, “Who wants to read this in the original?” Silence. She put down her cigarette and peered at us over half-frame glasses. “None of you read Latin?” she said. Then, from memory, she recited the section about Icarus. I had never heard Latin spoken before; I was mesmerized by the sound of the words.

Now I followed Katherine to her study, which had floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a loft accessible only by ladder, and an oak conference table. It reminded me of a room in an English manor. Earlier in the evening we had sat at this table, talking about her estranged husband, who had contributed to her breakdown. “He knows how to hit without leaving marks,” she’d said. I wondered if she had ever come to class bruised and aching under those dark tunics she always wore.

I climbed the ladder to the loft, pausing on the top step. Katherine leaned against the wall, loose pages from her latest manuscript strewn across the floor, along with a dozen empty vodka and scotch bottles. (If I had written this description in a story, she would have scrawled in the margin: “Give me a break!”) I hooked my leg over the top of the ladder and climbed into her loft.

I stayed up all night talking to her. I can’t remember what I said, but I hope I told her that in a college with more than twenty thousand students, she was the first professor who’d made me feel like an individual and not a cow passing through a chute. I hope I told her that killing herself was a cliché and beneath her. I hope I told her that I admired her, loved her.

I do know that the next morning she was still alive — and is still alive.

Name Withheld

At the age of twenty-four, after my mood swings and irrational behaviors grew more frequent and I started to hear whispering, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Seven years later I have learned to live with this disease and have even formed a relationship with it. We meet after dark.

A manic episode can keep me up for days on end. My wild thoughts — which at the time seem rational — will not allow me to sleep. I might believe that the glow of a streetlight outside is an alien spacecraft, or that the shadows are wild animals out to attack me.

I must confess, I love the energy that an episode brings. I can write for hours on end. If I had the means and the know-how, I could probably build a boat! I have fallen in love with the night, because then there is no doctor to advise me, no family to interrupt; no time to think about the consequences, no time for regrets.

I take my medication because I don’t want to be a burden on my loved ones. But if it were up to me, I would forget all about medication and let the night swallow me whole.

Name Withheld

As soon as I set foot on the University of Montana campus, I knew I wanted to go there the next fall. I was on a school trip with a group of other seniors, and I ran into an old boyfriend, Mike, who was a student at um. He and I spent a couple of hours talking in the warm May sun and discovering we were still attracted to each other. Since Mike had left for college, I’d started dating another guy, Tim, and we’d gotten pretty serious, but now I wanted to be with Mike more than I did with Tim.

On the bus ride home I decided to break up with Tim, go to college, and be with Mike. Tim would never have supported my going to college, anyway.

When our bus got back to town, I called Tim and said I was coming over. I was nervous driving to his duplex, but I had broken up with a couple of other boys before, and I had remained friends with them. I figured the same would happen with Tim. I’d decided not to mention Mike, only my desire to go to college unattached.

Tim’s roommates were out, and we were alone. When I told him I thought we should break up, he was speechless. Then he started crying as if he were in physical pain: How could I do this to him? He’d thought I loved him; had that been a lie? How could I hurt him this way?

I hadn’t expected such a reaction. I told him he’d get over me, but he swore he wouldn’t and just kept crying. When I started to leave, he begged me not to. He said I at least owed him a chance to convince me we should stay together.

He played romantic albums and asked me to hold him. Every time I thought he was calming down, he’d start up again. When his roommates came home, I thought it was my chance to escape, but Tim insisted we move into his bedroom. I went along rather than cause a scene.

As the night went on, Tim wore me down. By the time the sun came up, I’d agreed not to break up with him.

I married Tim and stayed with him for twelve years, terrified of what he’d do if I ever tried to break up with him again. When the marriage ended, he did cry and carry on, but within two weeks he was with someone new. I felt like a fool.

C.T.
Kalispell, Montana

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