You were gone, long gone, and I could no longer smell your scent as I walked through the empty house. I couldn’t bring myself to unpack the boxes, and they lurked like a forest of overgrown drab Legos.
The phone rang occasionally. I didn’t even realize I had a phone connected until the first time the shrill sound reverberated through the house. I didn’t know where the phone lived under the detritus of newspaper, food cartons, and tissues.
When the knocking started, I ignored that, too. The newspapers stopped arriving and the phone and electricity stopped working. I paced in the darkness, avoiding the shattered mirrors on the walls. How they ever got hung I couldn’t remember.
One day it began to rain inside. The thunder rolled and rolled and rolled like a train rumbling by and the leak sprang in the roof. I watched the raindrops fall on the blue floor and ached to be anywhere else. Ached tiredly, without energy behind it, not enough to stand outside and bathe in the rain. I stood under the trickle from the ceiling and felt the cool water drip from the tip of my nose.
I stood there for a long time, letting the rain seep into my filthy shirt, before I felt the call.
I went to the kitchen and unpacked a single bowl. It had been your bowl. I placed it on the floor under the leak and listened with satisfaction to the plink-plink-plink of the raindrops in the bowl. My hands moved without my volition, and I began to unpack. I could do this.
Despite the rain, there came a knock at the door. I stumbled across the messy floor and unlocked the door.
