When her screaming finally woke me I found myself choking her. As I tried to figure out where I was in this particular dark she coughed and whispered and cried and as my hands moved away from her throat she whispered that I was yelling "get the fuck off of me" over and over. I looked at her. Then at my hands. Then sprinted from the bedroom, down the stairs, out a back door, and was maybe two hundred yards from the house and deep in the woods before the snow on my feet and the January wind on my naked body brought me stumbling back to the present.

You tell a story like this carefully. You need to. And so I did. The psychiatrist said to never go to sleep without taking the right meds. "Never?" I asked. "But ya know, what if I'm thinking about doing something that shouldn't be done on those meds and just fall asleep?" "Like what?" he asked.  "Like driving, or sex." "It's up to you," he said, "I don't really think you'll kill anyone but you might freeze your dick off." 

He had tried. He was trying to take me deep into regression therapy and root out what was farthest down. I guess I tried. But I was realizing that my brain was leading us down false corridors. Protecting itself by creating a diabolical labyrinth.

As if in a video  game without controllers we were led into dead ends. False doors were flung open. Trip wires threw us, at least me, to the floor. Funhouse mirrors lied to me over and over. It wouldn’t be the first or last time therapy failed.

As for the woman in question, well…

The moon was such a bright crescent that I could see the arc of the full sphere through the earth's shadow. The extreme of the cold made the sky something beyond transparent. The snow clouds of the lake's edge had retreated offshore. As the world flowed back to me, my shivering caused the stars to blur; and I can't even guess at what I was searching for when I fell face first into the powdery white.

I apologized to her from safely across a restaurant table and coffee the next day. I didn't ask for forgiveness or another chance. She had come prepared with an "I like you but I need to feel safe" speech but when I watched her begin to unload it I told her it wasn't necessary, dropped money for the check on the table, and walked away.

If she had come out to help me in the snow, or had just called from a door or window, things might have been different. I might even be willing to fall asleep with someone again. 

But she didn't, so I didn't. Now I simply take comfort in that I held on to enough shreds of survival instinct, just enough, that before frostbite I climbed up and went back to find clothes and car keys that night, and other nights, and haven't yet succumbed to the silence of suicide.

Ira Socol