When am I?

You lock the door at night and climb into bed, pulling the blanket up tight to your chin to create a warm little womb, but before you can sleep you know that you’ll have to climb from the cushioned dark to double check the locks. It’s not that you’re really afraid; it’s just that you can’t really relax until you are certain that he house is secure. Maybe it would be different if you didn’t live alone. Probably not, though.

In the morning you make too much coffee and leave half the pot to go stagnant during the day. You remind yourself, for maybe the billionth time, to only fill it half way tomorrow. Then you set about feeding the cat. It isn’t until he purrs at you, looking up from his dish with too wide almond eyes that you think of me for the first time today and feel the tears trying to build. You shake that shit off and get on with it.

You don’t work anymore. That kind of goes without being said. You have your widow’s benefits, and your family helps out a little. Sometimes you think that you should find a job. Maybe, you think, it would fill the hours. Honestly, though, you just can’t see the point.

After I died you thought that you would too. But, somehow you just didn’t. People keep telling you things you don’t want to hear. You’ve had your fill of dumb cliché: time heals all wounds and life goes on and so on and so on and so on. You figure that mostly those things are true. But then again, sometimes they aren’t.

Most of your food gets nuked. You were never much of a cook anyway. You don’t eat standing over the sink. You’ve spared yourself that indignity by eating on the couch, cat curled at your feet, watching TV shows that you never really see.

Sometimes, very late at night, after you’ve double checked (and maybe triple checked) the locks, just as you’re starting to fade from that point that isn’t wakefulness but isn’t sleep into real slumber you think you hear my voice. You can almost hear me speaking in that sleepy way that I would just before I dozed off. The part of your brain that is still turned on knows that this is the edge of dream, but fight against waking. When this happens you pull your pillow tight against you and cry without knowing. Sometimes you wish that I’d haunt you. You’d be satisfied with an angry, vengeful ghost. You’d be satisfied with almost anything.

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Saved by the Bell is getting crazier.

xTx is making me lose my mind.

There is not a single person on the plant that wants this fucking thing

Molly Gaudry has interesting thoughts on first lines.

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