At 3am on the morning of Christmas Eve, I woke myself up out of a dream because I was praying. Out loud.

I know I was awake because I could hear myself trying to talk in that garbled sleep voice. My brain was on, my body was off. My sleep mask had shifted off my eyes, as it does, and I could see a yellowish flickering pinhole light coming from the corner of my room. Like a tiny Tinkerbell. Like a vintage lightbulb with one of those metal coils inside.

I finished the prayer and then I said, “You can’t be here, [Alex]. Get out. GET OUT.”

The second time I said it, I roared it in my head, and as I did, I felt the energy of my anger coursing through my entire body. The twinkling light became enormous, filling the corner of the room, bleeding towards the window.

Then I fully woke up.

I stared around my room in confusion, vaguely wondering if I should be afraid, if I was in danger. I fell right back to sleep before I could consider it for too long.

In the dream, I was telling my mom what just happened.

She said, “Don’t you remember what happened last night?”

She pulled out her phone and showed me a video of this ball of light spontaneously blooming in my living room, pushing over candles and other random objects. In the video, I reached out to touch it, and it danced around my hand like a tiny pet/fairy.

I looked up from the phone and the light appeared in front of me in the dream. I reached out for it, but it kept evading me or dancing straight through my palms.

Then I woke up again.

Last night in the bathtub, as I was running through the shuffle on my master Spotify playlist, Alex’s music kept coming up, to the degree that a song was popping up every other song. Songs that are of significance to us, that are tied to a particular memory. Even many of the songs I was skipping through were songs connected to the two of us.

He always finds a way to make sure I never forget.

Christmas was our anniversary for many, many years. We even had a tree at the beach house. One of our last Christmases together, he decorated it for me by surprise, and I wept at his frantic hope for repair. We slow-danced in front of it as he sang “Unchained Melody” into my hair, more promises that he never had any intention of keeping woven into the air.

This time, this time, a brand new start. I always wanted to believe him.

But what does this mean? I worry about how close he is to me, or how close he might be. What was the light in my bedroom? Am I safe?

Will I ever really be safe again?