I am tired tonight, and drained. I got almost no sleep last night.

Maria had an awful dream, a nightmare, perhaps the worst and most disturbing dream either of us can remember having in our time together, and we have had some pretty jarring dreams.

Her nightmare was physical, I could see it in her face and body for  hours.

She woke up shouting in terror and calling for help, and she spent the next hour talking, shaking, breathing, getting her bearings. I was afraid for her. She was struggling to catch her breath, her heart was racing.

We got on Netflix on my smart phone and pulled up Queer Eyes, the  crew was transforming another awkward and hapless straight man into Johny Depp by buying him some new clothes, fixing up his bedroom and teaching him to make cookies with his daughter.

There were plenty of sappy Norman Vincent Peale’isms also.

(I love this show, talk about small acts of great kindness.  It is the perfect bedtime program to watch, there is always a happy ending, the heroes are nice and generous. Total transformation is not only possible, it only takes a couple of days.

The premise of the program is that gay people have a sense of style, fashion and food, and a lot of people don’t. Then I watch a British mystery, Maria falls asleep and I’m up for much of the night.)

Maria and I both suffer from long and hard nights sometimes, we each wish we could make the other feel better. Last night broke my heart a bit, if you love someone, it pierces the heart to see them in so much pain.

She wrote about this nightmare on her blog a bit,  and will write about it more if and when she is ready. It isn’t for me to talk about it, it’s  her dream. I wanted in the worst way to help her, and understood that I couldn’t really, other than just being present.

By morning, we were both raw and exhausted.

Not surprisingly, we had a good fight, lots of anger shouting for a few minutes, it was like flushing the toilet, wash the shit out.

But it is very rare for us to do that, it is frightening in itself – I heard fighting every day of my life until I was 18 – even though we both know it is inevitable.

Tonight, we are like zombies, yawning as we write on our blogs, I was so tired I just picked up Shrimp Fried Rice in Bennington this afternoon when I went to get my computer fixed,  and brought it home for dinner. I couldn’t have prepared a peanut butter and jelly sandwich tonight.

Maria, usually so upbeat and energetic, is sleepwalking tonight, going through the motions. The dream still is haunting her. Her spirit is floating around somewhere.  I can’t help her, not really.

This is where love is tricky. You really can’t swoop in and solve other people’s problems. You really can’t.

This has been one of the hardest lessons of my life, and I am still learning it.

But it is, for me, the beginning of love. And friendship also. I’ve tried to save a lot of friends lives, and not a single one is a friend today.

That’s not going to happen to my marriage.

Thomas Merton wrote that the beginning of love is the will to let those we love be themselves, for better or worse.

The task is not to twist the people we love to fit our own image, or our own ideas about feeling safe, or to shove our own wisdoms and experiences down their throats, or assume we know what is best for them.

If in loving them, we do not love who they are, but only seek to see ourselves reflected in their faces and spirits, then we don’t really love them. We are only loving the reflection of ourselves that we see in them.

Love for me is learning again and again to face and accept my own failings and limitations. In that way, I leave space for someone I love to live. Love is about living for another in some ways, of learning that I am human, like everyone else, and have plenty of weaknesses and deficiencies.

It is because of those weaknesses that I need her and that she needs me. But we are  not all weak or troubled in the same ways, no two people are, we have to be left alone to find our own way. If we love someone, we learn to step back and watch, and listen.

I think at the root of our love is not that we are alike, but that we are  not. We each make up in ourselves for the lack in the other.

So Maria’s dream was yet another lesson for me in how to love, to give her the space to suffer in her own way, and learn how to be strong.