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All By Myself
Iwakeupwitha pillow covering my head.1It’s been two weeks since Beth’s death and my subconscious still hasn’t broken the habit. Because Beth typically came home from Peaches in the early morning hours, I’d buffer the sound of her arrival with a pillow. I did it so often that I eventually started doing it in the middle of my sleep without conscious thought.
I push the pillow off with a sour taste in my mouth. I’m hot and sweaty under my comforter, the noon sun streaming through the windowpane like it’s a goddamn magnifying glass.
I’ve always been a morning person. I’m that annoying person on vacation that pops out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn insisting we go for a sunrise hike. But since the nightmares started, I’ve been taking sleeping pills to get any semblance of peace, and they keep me knocked out until well past noon.
It feels irrelevant, what time I wake up. Especially since I’ve canceled all my freelance writing projects, I have literally nothing to wake up for. Time feels like one continuous blur in fast motion, but also as if it’s stopped moving completely and will only start back up when justice is served.
I hardly remember her funeral. There were purple flowers, I remember that. She would have liked them. But not much else. I guess my traumatized brain decided to black out or suppress that memory, but not the one that haunts me every night in my dreams.
Pools of yellow. Blurred brake lights in red. Black. And the stabbing.
It never ends. The stabbing.
Even when her glassy, empty eyes fall to mine, the siren never comes and the stabbing never stops.
Bile crawls up my throat at the thought of the images I can’t get rid of. I’d drink a gallon of bleach if it could scrub my mind clean. Instead, I pick up the pillow and scream into it until my breath runs out.
The growl from the hollow pit of my stomach is the only reason I get up and shuffle to my bedroom door. Our—my—apartment is small, the dated kitchen opening up to the cramped-but-cozy living space. Well, it was much cozier when the numerous house plants were alive and green. Without Beth, and my lack of ability to care about something as trivial as plants, half of them are shriveled and brown.
I step out of my room, and the putrid smell of whatever is rotting on the dirty dishes in my kitchen sink makes me gag. The trash can is overflowing with to-go containers, and I know for a fact that there is nothing edible in the fridge. My stomach doesn't care. It still rumbles even though I have nothing to satisfy it.
I swear I’ll get to that mound of dishes today. Just like I swore I would yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. I know I won’t, but it makes me feel better to pretend. And when just about everything reminds me of her and picks at the raw and bleeding wound still gaping in my heart, I’ll take anything I can get.
The most blaring reminder is the black-and-yellow evidence tape strung across her bedroom door. The police went through it the day after her murder, and I haven’t gone in since.
I can’t.
It’s like some small, delightfully foolish recess of my mind thinks that if I don’t touch her things, she’ll come back to collect them.
Beth’s family told me to take my time going through her belongings. They didn’t want to “disrupt my grieving by rushing the process.”
“Whenever I was ready,” they said.
What the fuck is that supposed to mean?It’s hard to believe I will ever be “ready” to face the fact that my best friend since fucking kindergarten is dead.
Not just dead. Murdered.
I wish they would care a little less about mygrieving processand a little more about the fact that the cops are dragging their fucking feet. I don’t understand how they can just accept that the police have hit a dead end instead of rioting at the station every damn day. Because that’s what I want to do.
I’ve already been escorted out three times. I was told that if I come back in the same manner, I would be arrested for harassment of a law enforcement officer. Apparently, they don’t like it much when you blow an air horn in the station, demanding updates on a case.
Maybe if they were better at doing their fucking job…
My lungs start seizing up, and I wheeze for air.
The pounding in my chest intensifies, the panic attack seconds away from crashing down on me. I race the rest of the way to the bathroom and slam the shower faucet on, jumping in before the water has a chance to heat up.
The cold water beats down on me as I slide down the tile wall, curling into a ball in the shower basin.
I put all my energy into focusing on the icy assault, because if I don’t take my mind off that yellow-and-black tape covering the door and what lies behind it, I’m certain my heart will simply give out.
“You like blue cheese? They got the best salad with this blue-cheese dressing. I’m not a salad man, but damn, I’d eat that by the truck load,” my cab driver says so animatedly that I am half-expecting him to park and come dine with me. I mentally groan at the thought.
Choosing where and what to eat feels so insignificant and selfish. Beth is six feet under, and I’m torn between chow mein or pizza.Jesus Christ.
It doesn’t help that every spot I’d usually go to is full of memories with Beth. I’ve taken to hailing a cab and telling the driver to take me to their favorite restaurant. If it’s one I’ve been to with Beth, I ask them to pick another. And since my car was taken for evidence and I never picked it up, it’s this or walking. Add that to the list of things that I don’t have the energy for.
