Four a.m. and he still isn’t home. Four a.m. and all there is to show for it is the ache in my back from ceaseless tossing and the ever-present, ever-darkening circles under my eyes. Four a.m. and the condensation on my water glass has long since made a ring on my nightstand—sweating through the wood as I am through my nightshirt.

I feel clamminess in my feet and a tightening in my throat. The mattress feels lumpy and unfamiliar. Four a.m. and my fingertips run across one another in an effort to ground me to the here and now. I close my eyes tighter and tighter and tighter until I see green and blue and pink spots floating around in the ether of my subconsciousness. I open my eyes and the room doesn’t focus. I open my eyes and the world feels fuzzy and unreal and be speckled. I squint and train my eyes to focus on the 1-2-3-4 [come on, baby, say you love me] iron slats secured to my window.

Four a.m. and I suddenly remember where I am and why I’m here and how he’s never coming back to me. How I’m experiencing what my doctors are calling “a shock and grief-induced psychotic break.” How my sister and brother-in-law brought me to this fine Bemelmans Institution for rest when they could no longer handle my grief. How they left me here to rot for [five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes] the past 13 months without bothering to call or text or email or write or visit or send carrier pigeons to check in on me. Maybe they have? I block most everything out since he left.

Four a.m. and my pills sit on the nightstand, undisturbed. Four a.m. and I think about how it used to be. We’d nestle into each other. Our bodies producing so much heat that sheets and blankets and heaters became obsolete. How he’d climb into bed smelling of the distinct combination of tea and pine needles. How he brushed the hair way from my eyes in those moments before sleep and tell me he’d always be there.

Until he wasn’t.

Four a.m. and I ache with longing. Four a.m. and my hair covers these very eyes that he used to stare into. Four a.m. and I have nothing left.

Last week I had a breakthrough, I guess. If you call a debilitating memory and realization a breakthrough. My mind has been safeguarding my heart for so long. I have been living in this place for the past year, constantly thinking it was our home, the little green house at the top of the hill, the one that was bursting with love and flowers and pound cake and dreams. And every so often, I realize where I am just long enough for it to hurt badly enough to send me back to the sunshine of the hammock and his head on my chest, rhythmically breathing and rocking and dreaming.

Dreaming. Dreaming. That is not real. This is real. This is what happened.

Four a.m. and God help me, I’m accepting it.

We met. As people do. He was working for a non-profit and I specialized in creating fairy dreamscapes atop cakes at a local beloved bakery. He ordered a cake for his niece’s fifth birthday, indicating that each fairy had to have the elegance of Princess Grace and the poise of a Pre-Raphaelite goddess. He smelled like tea and pine needles and Romance with a capitol R. He wanted the fairies to be strong. He wanted them to prey on men using their charms. Or I did. No, I did.

He loved the cake. He invited me to deliver the cake myself. It was an initiations into his family. I was not voted THE WEAKEST LINK. I stayed. We loved. He loved. I loved. We loved.

It was one of those all-consuming loves that I used to laugh about in movies. He was a mirror [I don’t wanna lose you now, I’m looking right at the other half of me], reflecting my inner love and light and weightlessness with his own. If you were to shine al ight on us through faceted glass, our prism of colors would bounce around your universe and pull you in. We loved. He loved. I loved. You loved.

I moved in. His family lived with him. It was fine. It was love. A big love. All of us, together. I made food. She did laundry. She did the cleaning. She did the recycling. He had ideas. He had ideas that dreaming was doing and listening and following will make hope spring eternal and if we all share our ideas we will be enlightened and saved and loved, always loved.

We got married. They got married. They were married. We were married and he had ideas. He shared his ideas. They followed. We followed.

Four a.m. and I am here. In an institution.

There was a blackness inside of him that grew and grew and no amount of love or light could heal him. He deteriorated and my fairies danced a dance of mourning. His heart grew weak. His hair fell out. His legs couldn’t hold him any longer. And he had an Idea.

He had an idea that we should follow him to enlightenment.

My fairies didn’t want to go. They weren’t ready. God help me, God help me.

She and she and she and the little ones wouldn’t listen to my fairies. They followed him. God help me, they followed him and they weren’t enlightened or saved.

Special report: Authorities are releasing limited information on these unfolding events. Allegedly, an underground cult leader—in his dying days—made a suicide pact with his followers. All but one perished. More to come.

All but one. Four a.m. and I know. All but one. All but one is me.