The silence woke her.
Not only was she consistently
used to noise all night,
but her anxiety made it deafening.

Impossible to quiet her mind,
she walked to the window,
feet quietly padding along a hardwood floor.
Her husband stirs, but does not wake.
He never really understood the way he claimed to.

In the beginning, she would wake him when she could not sleep;
hoping he could soother her enough to drift off,
but he proved useless at this.
It would take a quite serious emergency
to fully wake him.
And she had long since given up trying.

At this point,
She'd given up on many things, really.
With so little left to believe in,
she simply existed.
Drifting through life.
A ghost, long dead and forever lost.
Staring out the window at a
dying, hgelpless moon.