Floating  

   “There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “It’s already done.”

     Her voice always wakes me up when I’m trying to sleep, but when I turn on the light, when I’m still in-between worlds, I think she’s there. Until I look around and find no one.

     I think about killing myself for the third time today when the waitress gets my order wrong.

     I wanted my eggs scrambled, but they stare back at me. Two yellow, runny eyes. It’s raining outside, causing the sidewalks to swell up with dirty water. I wonder if it will turn into a flood, lift the diner off of its foundation so it floats away.

     On average these days, I think about death more than I think about life. I know I’m too much of a coward to do it. I don’t even know if I want to, not really. But thinking, I can’t stop thinking.

     The second time I thought about it today was when I was in the shower and started crying for seemingly no other reason than the fact that my face was already wet.
      The first was when I woke up, reaching my hand across the covers to find the rest of the bed cold.
      “Sorry, hon,” the waitress says. “Can I get you something else?”
      I tell her no. I’m not hungry anymore.
      I thought we were mostly okay. We never really fought, neither of us liking confrontation. We were together for almost three years before everything died. Pictures on the walls shrunk, flowers crumpled in on themselves before turning black.

     The fourth time I think about killing myself today is when I’m back in my car and the heat stops working. The rain soaked through my coat and I’m shivering. I wonder if the water will rise more. If it will go past my tires, get into my car and soak through the upholstery. If I stayed in my car all day as the flood swept through, would it be enough?

     A month ago, for my birthday, she tried baking me a cake while I was at work. I came home to a smoke-filled house and her crying on the kitchen floor. “I can’t do this,” she said.

     I asked her what she meant, but she only went to our bedroom and slammed the door.

     I had only seen her cry a few times, mostly when there were things going on that she couldn’t control. Her cat died, her parents got divorced. Things she couldn’t stop or draw out.

     She told me the next day that she was going to visit her parents and would be back in a few weeks.

     She didn’t come back.

     I called, wrote, left messages. I went up to her parent’s house, to her friends, her job, and they all told me they hadn’t seen her. Wherever she was, she didn’t want to be reached. She didn’t want to be found.

     I call out of work when I get back to the house. They tell me that if I continue to take sick days, they’ll fire me. I say it won’t happen again, but the pause between my response and my boss’ tells me that we both know I’m lying.

     I crawl back into bed, there’s no other place that makes sense lately.

     She always had problems sleeping. She’d toss and turn all night. I’m a heavy sleeper, but sometimes the motion of the mattress would wake me. I’d curl myself around her and make her still. Sometimes she’d sleep through the night that way.

     When everything ended, all I got was a phone call. She told me what she was hiding beneath her smile, her personality, and clothes. I told her we could work it out. That I was upset, but that I still loved her.

     “That’s why I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t be with someone that could love me after what I’ve done.” The silence on the other end of the line buzzed through my ears, splitting my head in half.

     But in my dreams, she’s still here. I don’t think about life or death, or the consequences of either one. In between being asleep and awake, I can see her brown hair in my hands, leaking through the cracks in my fingers as we both stretch out over the mattress.  She’s unaware of what she’s done. How we’re both on a sinking ship, her in a lifeboat while I’m still behind the helm. I don’t care if the baby would have drowned us. I would have been happy to drown.