“I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness…”

― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

I can’t sleep. My mind races, a tangled mess.

It keeps trying to take me back to the morning I found him. There are flashes of events: walking down the sidewalk, the unnatural warmth of a February morning, flashing lights…a bloodied shirt.

When I close my eyes, I feel anxious. When I open them, I feel weary.

I wish the black, inkiness of the night would consume me. I want to crawl into a void, a bottomless pit.

Is this what purgatory is like?

I don’t wish for death, but I don’t want life.

I don’t know what I should be feeling: fury, sadness, guilt, anger, despair. Maybe I feel all this at once and that’s why my body can’t settle down. I need to untangle myself from the events that just occurred.

I’m 24-years-old. I’m planning the funeral of my 27-year-old husband. His demons haunted him, alcohol poisoned him, our marriage trouble him. Whose doing is this? His for pointing that gun to his head? Mine for all the arguments that a dual-military lifestyle brought to us? His family for the abuse they delivered throughout his whole life? The military for worsening the depression that plagued him? Society’s for stigmatizing mental health screenings and illnesses? Is it all of us at blame?

Does it even matter at this point because he’s never coming back, my children will never really know him, and everything that we knew has ended.

That bullet pierced the fabric of before and left a mess of what’s now after and I’m left lying on a bed facing the loneliness of the night.