He appeared first in those half-awake early morning hours when the dawn was just beginning to tinge the sky pink, and my body refused to be roused. The bed was too soft, the covers too silky, the pillow plumped just the way I wanted it. The long night prior had been a fitful rage of intermittent sleeplessness or the drugged depth of nothingness. It had been that way for weeks, my mind unsettled, my body refusing to succumb to what my brain told it to do.

At first it was his eyes, always the eyes, magnetic eyes that pulled me to him. Eyes that saw the sadness I had entombed under the facade constructed over two decades. Brick by brick, broken promise by broken promise, lie by lie—I built my protection. A facade that told the world I was strong and happy and secure.

None of it was true.

I wasn’t any of those things. I was an actor. An actor who so desperately wanted her surface life to be real that she lied to herself. Believing that love would conquer all because it was what she had been taught and what she had been promised by the alcoholic husband she had awarded her heart.

Somehow this new man, this man in my dreams knew of the empty void inside me, the void my husband didn’t see, or more likely, didn’t want to acknowledge. Acknowledgement would have brought more tears and more hurt and more guilt. Would have forced him to face, again, the hurt he had inflicted on me. Would have forced him to revisit his weakness and illness and bad-husbandness. He wanted his own facade, one where he was better now. Sober now. Committed to his marriage now.

He wanted the facade where his wife had never looked at him with disgust because he had changed for her, repented, and was locking bad husband in his past. Relegating the weak husband he had been, to a place where only today and tomorrow mattered, not the past.

I thought I had done that too, placed the ugliness of our marriage in a box on the back shelf of the closet in my mind where I no longer had to feel its sharp edges. I had made that decision. There was no one to blame. I hadn’t been arm-twisted into accepting my husband’s flaws or the way I had become collateral damage. I had re-chosen my marriage five years earlier believing it could be saved because love was still present. Flawed and broken, yes, but love, nonetheless.

So why was he here, this man with the magnetic eyes, this man I didn’t even know, who moved from my early morning dreams to becoming my middle-of-the-night reprieve to eventually becoming the one thing in my life that allowed me to feel?

He infiltrated my thoughts, calling to me with whispered promises of devotion. Sleepless nights became a delicious escape as I conjured his presence to keep me company. I was lost in a schoolgirl crush with good sex dreams. But why was he here? Surely, he had a purpose.

I knew it wasn’t healthy, obsession isn’t a sign of a healthy mind. I picked up the phone to call a therapist, hanging up on the first ring instead. I needed him. I didn’t want this fantasy man to leave me. Needed to be reminded I could feel something in the dark in the middle of the night when there was nothing to face but myself. There in those early morning dreams I was again a woman who didn’t shoulder the baggage of her husband’s addiction or betrayals.

Day by day, night by night, fantasy by fantasy, I began to see my obsessions’ purpose. This man was here to be my mirror. To show me what I had lost in the slow drip of life leaving my body as I saved another from his own demise. This fantasy man was here to show me that in saving my husband, I had sacrificed my own mental health and now, to save myself, I needed to end a marriage to a man I still loved.

But it was not too late. If my heart could beat fast and sturdy for a man I had never met, perhaps it could regrow, beating for the promise of what might be.

This man, this obsession, he had appeared to give me a gift. The gift of me.