I looked up, moved my eyes from right to left. The room was painted a murky yellow, swirls of green around the edges, stretching, slowly, as I watched them, and meeting at the centre of the ceiling. Then the walls began to lose consistency, to wobble and melt, sliding down the swirls like stewed meat off a bone. They dropped off completely and I realized that the darker stripes were metal bars, held together by a circular railing at the top, like an aviary. The steel looked green against the sulphuric sky and I could hear the muttering, somewhere, of birds stirring. The more I listened, the more alien the noises sounded, and I began to think that these animals could only inhabit a world very different from ours. I understood then that my sleeping body must have travelled to a planet unfit for human beings, which explained the mustard-yellow sky outside the cage. In the distance, I spotted a pale moon, then another. This was wrong and I felt the panic rise like bile in my mouth. The humming escalated as the planet woke to a new day and my chest folded in on itself. I couldn’t breathe.

I woke up, covered in sweat, really awake. I ran to the toilet, I had to get away from Ruth. I masturbated in the house of my dead mother. I cried with my forehead pressed against the tiles. I hate crying, so it offered no relief. My own tears filled me with a sodden kind of disgust. How could Ruth have let this happen? I thought that I could be completely safe with her. I felt alone in the world and I said to myself, eventually, you will find freedom in having no family at all. A man must learn to thrive in loneliness. These were the kinds of thoughts with which I comforted myself as a young man. I did have Ruth. But could I trust her completely, now she’d failed me when I’d needed her most?

Ten years together. Long enough to forgive and forget. Ruth is everything I like in a girl. There is a reason we’ve been together this long and it’s not about choosing each other each day but about forgetting there is even a choice. In both good and bad ways, for better or worse, the things I find attractive in her are also the things that drive me absolutely mad. That’s how love works. You can’t pick and choose, can’t have one without the other. And, anyway, the sleep paralysis didn’t come back for a long time. I thought I might as well propose to her, in sickness and health, et cetera, et cetera. It made sense.