The month before

This will be the first in the series of updates that I've promised. As one might expect, it starts from where I left of.

It actually must have started somewhere in late January. The telephone company 'Time Warner Cable' which provided Vinokur the 50 hours of cheap international calling facility per month discontinued its services. It was a shock to us. I mean, we spoke a lot. Upto 10 hours a day. Half on Skype in my night time and the other half when I was travelling. That's when the 'Alarm Cock' calls had to be stopped; these were calls by Alan which would wake me up in the morning (IST). He loved to hear my voice. He loved to be the alarm. That gave him such an important emotional 'shot in the arm' before he went to sleep.

This coincided with one day in which I didn't wake up to his routine calls. I was so tired and sleepy that I wanted to sleep a few hours more. He wanted to talk to me for a few minutes before hitting bed. I postponed this 'alarm' by an hour three or four times. And he was bored during the period in between. He didn't have nothing but The Jon Stewart show to watch.

Both of this, led to a period of about a month when he didn't have anything to do at night before sleeping. He got bored and tried to go sleep earlier. And because he had to sleep earlier, he woke up earlier and since he didn't have to do anything at the middle of the night, he had to take a second serving of his 'blue pills' to go to sleep.

Along with that, malaise set in which was the side effect of a drug that he was taking which was causing the discomfort. He found it difficult to even talk for a lot of time on Skype like how we used to in the first seven months of our relationship. The cause was not exactly clear. There was depression, anxiety and physical malaise ailing him most of the awake time that he spent.

He was also finding it difficult to manage the paper work (VISA etc) for the travel that is required. He used to tell me it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to concentrate on anything. Even a phone call seemed to be a arduous enough task forcing him to hang up much earlier that he used to. To cope up with the excess stress, he used to take extra pills from those which he was on. That included sedatives and specialized medication for coping with ADHD. Every morning, after he woke up he would give me his routine call. I would question him regarding how many pills he took the night before and he would claim to not remember he had taken twice the dose that was prescribed or not.

I really didn't act like a doctor then. I guess love overrides all stipulations of human behaviour. I wanted him to feel better and I thought he had things under control. In retrospect, this lackadaisical-ness from my side seems to have been the reason why the situation has worsened so much. All I wanted was for him to come to me and take it from there.

We knew that all of these problems were aggravated with the separation factor. Our union seemed to be the 'cure'.