A piercing ray of light spliced the darkness of the cold bedroom. I awakened, trying to deny the fact that I was aware of my surroundings. I had not noticed when he slipped out of the bed, nor did I know that he left the room. As he entered, the light played with his features. It created a halo around his face and shoulders as if to suggest that he was one of God's creatures, a seraphim descended from heaven itself. It only lasted for a moment as he walked through the doorway toward the bed where I lay. The light went out leaving his silhouette etched in my vision with swirling hues of blue, gold, green, and red.

I glanced at the alarm clock which read 3:15 A.M. His insomnia was getting worse. He had been gone for some time now; his pillow was as cold as the howling winter winds outside. I knew he was crawling back into bed by the way the water violently rose and fell underneath me only to subside to a gentle rocking wave and then to such a slow ripple that I could not tell whether the bed was moving or if I was only imagining it.

I moved to wrap my arms around him in the hope of soothing his mind. As I held him, the world around us slowly grew still. The rampaging winds ceased to blow outside and an eerie silence overtook the room. As if they were in pure agony, the walls heaved and twisted about, shattering in slow motion into glass-like shards; it started with the ceiling, creeping down the walls.

Soon, the floors began to tremble and crack like ice under too much pressure. The fractures spread in a web-like fashion to the bed we lay on. A stark black void revealed itself behind the falling pieces of reality. In a chain reaction, pieces of the floor dropped into the void along with the splintered bed. I felt a familiar disorientation that could only have been the sensation of us plummeting downward. Panic was not an option, so all I could do to ward it off was to hold on to him, remaining calm and knowing that our last moments will be ones of unified love.

As we descended into darkness, I saw the shards reflecting the contents of the shattered room like a mirror. I saw the full moon reveal itself outside, a single dried long-stemmed rose that rested on a bookshelf among numerous college textbooks, and a photo album which held the fond memories of our wedding.

It wasn't that we were falling; so much as everything was floating up past us. Eventually, an end to the darkness appeared with a red light at the bottom. I realized that our end was near. I held on to him tightly.