Bubble Wrap

Saturday. Mugs aligned like soldiers on the kitchen counter, color-coded, sizes vast and modest. A red bowl cradles red cherries. The sun lazily stretches its limbs, swelling, seeping into the room. Quiet and flickering. Everything's in my head, I'm just trying to decide how big my imagination should be. I'm just trying to decide what to make up in my head. Just trying to decide what to eat for breakfast. The coffee brews; I tense and release my jaw, crack my knuckles, bounce my legs, bite at my fingertips like a restless little animal. The coffee is ready, and it is too hot. A morning unmarked by a burnt tongue feels too wrong. Taking a sip, standing up. But I can't quite stand the unbearable noise of all this silence. Suddenly, I recall the box of images, the weatherman's firm voice bouncing off the walls and hitting me in the head, an assault on the senses. Brain damage. He forecasts rain—an unnecessary prophecy. Yet his voice paints over the emptiness. I let him.

Now, the news. Not the news. The mug clatters into the sink as the anchor's voice spills a tale of a body discovered beneath a bridge. Unidentified, with short brown hair—he details, but I don't quite hear the rest. I don't need to. I leave, wandering through town under the weight of whispered speculations, the collective gaze dripping with concern. "Did he kill himself?" they ask, but I don't quite hear the rest. I don't need to. 

I buy some milk. The cashier asks me if I've heard about the dead man. "Which one?" I ask. She looks away, and I think about how pretty her skin is. I wish her well without meaning it, and leave. My boots never carry me anywhere good; I take a strange route, a red-painted bridge. Rusty iron, scraped paint, graffiti vomit. I look up, and I look down. I lean over, pressing against the cool metal, peering down at the caution tape, yellow and sinister. Almost saw him there, almost saw him in all his glory. Joy vanished, if there was any.

Since the day he left, I've buried him every morning. He's the face on every dead man they find, every tragic news blip—every single one. I've been to more funerals than I can count, my wardrobe of black dresses completely worn through. Strangers, they've wept on my shoulder, thinking I'm someone—anyone—a friend, a coworker, a neighbor. And each time, each and every single time, I exhale that perverse sigh of relief, thank God it's not him they’re putting in the ground. But he's dead to me, dead in ways I wish I could take back, undo the knots of time and wrap him up in bubble wrap, lock him in a room and swallow the keys, just to know he'll always exist.