On my back, on the floor in the office. The white corkboard tiles of the ceiling are reflecting traffic from the street two flights below. Leaning against my desk is a paper cup half filled with water that I’ve been sipping from. I’m just a shrug away from the cup by the desk. It’s not directly next to my hand, so I won’t accidentally knock it over. It’s almost noon. I’m completely exhausted. I can’t hear anything outside my office; no rustling papers, no muted voices beyond the door. No footfalls in the hall bleed through the closed door. But I can hear the traffic outside quite clearly. The vehicles starting and stopping at the intersection, the sound of certain brakes whining to a halt while other engines are growling to resume. It’s muted beyond the glass wall of the office. I’m bathed in sunlight. I wish I had had the foresight to draw the blinds. But I have no intention of getting up for a while. The top two buttons of my shirt are undone. My tie is loosened. I’ve kicked my shoes off and they’re somewhere next to my feet. I’m laying down ruler straight, like a body in a casket; my hands are by my side. I’m watching the reflection of traffic on the ceiling. I don’t have any clue what I’m going to do when work is over, when it’s time to leave the office. But that’s a long time from now, so I’m okay. The lunch hour is right around the corner. Then four more hours of work. No one’s knocked on my office door since ten. I got on the floor shortly after that. It feels like the floor is spinning. It feels like I’ve been drinking. I haven’t been drinking. Not for a week. I haven’t had anything. Not much more than water from the fountain. I did have breakfast this morning. On the go. From the cafeteria in the hospital across the street. That feels so long ago. My stomach is growling, which I can hear. I can only feel the floor spinning, but not the emptiness of my stomach. I don’t have any energy. No desire. No will. No plans. Sometimes it feels like my face is going to bump into the ceiling. The floor is spinning awfully close to the ceiling. Orbit. I think it’s a panic attack. Or grief, mixed in with a panic attack. I just don’t know what to do. This has been the longest week of my life. They keep telling me to take time off, but I haven’t taken a single day off since my wife passed way. It happened on Sunday and I went straight back to work on Monday morning. Straight to work. A sign outside on the knob of the office door that says please do not bother has been working. No visitors since around ten. They probably think I’m fragile right now. And I am; who wouldn’t be? I don’t know what to do now. I can’t be expected to know, but at least I still show up to work. They’ll send me home by next week. I’ll still have my job when I get back. Work’s not something I’m worried about anymore.

Standing at the edge of the pier at night, only imagining what creatures may float about in the darkness below the water, grief becomes, after a time, just memory, no longer an intrusive feeling.

After grandfather passed away the house fell into an almost immediate disrepair. Our grandmother took to resentment and bitter avoidance. She would refuse, for instance, to come out of the piano room when others were in the house, and soon that room filled with the rancor of the dying. Upon entering the house, it looked and felt as if a grave had been upturned and left open. Her spoiled eyes peered out from a sunken face, squeezed tight with rage, loss, and something of fear. When I helped her to remove her sweater this morning, she winced and smacked my hands away, growling like a frightened puppy. I took my leave of the house and drove to my job at the wharf, remembering fondly how cute my grandmother and grandfather were together when I was younger, and how much they loved each other; nothing ever seemed to hold them down. That’s the way a boy should have to remember his grandparents. Not like this, with a house unfit to bury the dead in.

Just have your crimes, the ones you dream of.

Simple decisions were made cloudy by compounded pressure and too much whiskey. I left the cleric’s hall feeling as though I’d just woken up in a coffin, having found myself buried alive in some form of jest. And the fresh air outside did nothing to relieve me. If anything, the drive home served only to enrage me more; the excess of traffic, and the sounds of car horns blasting, and the seemingly endless sea of tail lights flashing low reds then high reds then low again, made me sick and dizzy. Why was my body seemingly sinking into the drivers seat? Was I melting? I used a pay telephone to put in a call to the office hall, to tell them I would be needing a week off. For a death in the family.

(Source: corpseonpumpkin.com)

Your children may not survive you.