I woke in the middle of the night to an unsettling sound—soft humming that slowly slipped into quiet laughter. Still half-asleep, I turned and realized it was Sayed. His arms jerked beneath the covers, his head twitched, his lips moved without forming real words, and his eyes rolled back. For a split second, I thought I was trapped in a nightmare. Then I understood I wasn’t dreaming at all. The man beside me, usually calm and gentle, looked like a stranger in his own body. I shouted his name, but he didn’t respond. Terrified, I grabbed my phone and called emergency services, my voice barely steady.
By the time the paramedics arrived, his body had gone still, almost unnervingly calm. I rode with him in the ambulance, holding his hand and whispering to him as monitors beeped around us. At the hospital, doctors ran tests and scans before explaining it was a mild seizure, likely brought on by exhaustion or stress. Those words echoed in my mind. Stress. Exhaustion. I knew he hadn’t been himself for months—staying up late, taking private calls, always keeping his phone turned face down. When a nurse asked if I’d noticed anything unusual, I said no without hesitation, even though I knew that wasn’t true.
The truth surfaced later. His phone, left unlocked, showed messages to a woman named Nadia, a therapist who worked with sleep disorders. He had been sending her recordings and videos of his sleepwalking and strange nighttime episodes—the same humming, twitching, and laughter that had frightened me. It wasn’t an affair. It was fear. He was terrified of letting me see how much he was losing control. He had been hiding his struggle, trying to manage it alone, slowly drifting between who he was awake and who he became at night.
When we finally sat down together, there were no more excuses or defenses. I set his phone between us and said quietly, “We can’t survive secrets. But maybe we can survive this—if you’re honest now.” He nodded, tears in his eyes. That night, lying side by side again, I listened closely. There was no humming, no laughter—just two people awake, finally facing the truth together.
