JUST SOMETHING (STORY)

Guilt settled on my head like a thousand pounds of bricks after she had passed away. I always thought that if I could just show her I loved her a little more every day she might have quit smoking. I wanted to be her addiction, I thought maybe someday she would realize that she only smoked because she thought it eased the pain of her own dysfunctional childhood. She grew up in a poor neighborhood in Barstow, California. Her dad was a abusive alcoholic who spent almost every dime he had trying to get to the end of every bottle. When he wasn’t intoxicated he spent his time telling her mother what a useless whore she was and seeing how many times he could force her head through the walls before she was unconscious . He tried telling her that her mom deserved what he had done to her because she was cheating on daddy. She ran away by the time she was fourteen, just old enough to start selling herself to the local scum that infested the streets Barstow heights. She saved up enough money so she could escape the long remembered demons of her relentless past. Sometimes I couldn’t understand how she came out to be such a wonderful and incredibly normal human being.

The ghosts of my past are scattered around my apartment like beer bottles after a frat party. I still had the pictures from our first date, Christmas at her grandparents’ house, and even our honeymoon strung up on the walls. some days I just wish that I wouldn’t wake up, that I would just join her in the ambience of the afterlife. I’ve considered suicide more than once, mostly after I’ve had a few drinks and page through the old picture books. I just can’t get past the thought that if I killed myself that I wouldn’t be with her. It’s an eternal darkness that pulls at my emotions like a comet being sucked into the ever pulling gravity of earth. I feel liked god chewed me up and spit me out leaving nothing more than pain, guilt, and sorrow. I have become a solemn man, I hardly ever interact with anyone any more unless I run into them at the grocery store. Even then I don’t like seeing any of my old acquaintances, we engage in the normal small talk, but I still see the pity buried in their eyes. I’ve become what one might consider a social leper, cut myself off from any thing that might have brought me joy before Janet was blown out of existence like a star on the brink of eternity.

It was freezing in the apartment, just like it always felt after Janet had passed away. It seemed like all the life and warmth of a happy home was washed away in a sea of emptiness. A sea of never ending shadows, so black, that it could take position over the sun, casting a plague of darkness over the earth. I guess it’s not much different from that life that I have been living the past year. The sun was casting a warm amber glow over the kitchen, it’s was almost as if she was there, cooking breakfast like she loved to do. Cooking was a passion of hers, I referred to it as an addiction, but I couldn’t complain. It was late November, coldest year that hit Barstow in a good thirty years. Slushy snow flakes danced in the sky to streets below like a flurry of broken teeth. The apartment was on the third floor, overlooking central park, it used to have such a tranquil appeal in the mornings. The way the mist would hang over the pond, and all the different birds singing , it was like a scene from a movie. I moved from the window trying to ease the pain.