In the night, I feel every dream is suffused with nightmare. At least for me, I can't speak of others. If you've watched someone sleeping, waiting for them to awaken perhaps, and notice you there, watching, and fearful they will see you, then you can understand what I'm saying. Since I've only watched women sleeping, not children or men, with the kind of fascination only a once-crushingly-lonely man can manage, it is often then, in the night, where the greatest fear of losing another settles in.
Horror is personal, but terror is communal. At least that's the message sent by a media which shrieks TERROR TERROR TERROR while images of bearded zealots and amputated soldiers floods our consciousness. So we find ourselves looking at the woman, in the night, perceiving a weakness of fear, of inability to stave off the snaking terror, of inescapable reality. This woman will die some day, no matter how much you love her. Whether it is a car accident, or cancer, or a slipping away into a night recognizable as the nothingness from which we came, and to which we return, she will die. This is personal horror, while personal terror is merely in how we will awaken the next morning after our loved ones are gone from this world. No one wants to arrive cold and shivering into that new world of loss.
In the end, there is little a man, even a watchful man, can do to stop such a thing. He can love her, and the way her hair falls, and the sheet where it clings to her lower back, but no one can escape their shadow, the final shadow.
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