Traces of me [fiction]

Give it time, he said, as if time was spare change in the pocket to give or throw away, as if time—Amorphous! Elusive!—were mine to give. Yesterday (or was it last year?) my heart was torn from my body and thrown into the road and I watched as it lay dying, the face of my son, my only child, my life, staring up at me through the pools of blood on the pavement. I no longer recognize the smiling faces of the people in the photographs; my husband, who was once so vibrant, transformed in the misery and agony of loss. I look in the mirror and I no longer recognize the stranger gazing back at me with my own eyes. Sometimes life is almost normal—we dine together, sometimes he cooks and sometimes I do, we watch T.V. and go to bed—though the warmth is gone. Sometimes I come home to an empty house and I order Chinese, husband stumbling home past midnight, eyes red from silent tears. This solid life of uncertainty.

It has been two Springs, two Summers, two Autumns, and one long Winter, seven seasons of lost time, and I have received little in return. I stand outside in the fresh blanket of snow, staring up at my house flanked by the bright homes of my neighbors, decorated in the happy glowing colors of the holidays. The ghostly house with the lone lit upstairs window where my husband is undoubtedly sitting alone in a sadness I cannot handle, for I can barely handle my own, the weight of it crushing my bones, is a dark blotch on the merrily-lit street. I feel myself shrinking into nothing.

Tomorrow I will tell him that time has run out and I have no more of it left to give, though in truth, time was never an issue to begin with. I have accepted that job overseas. I am leaving next week. I doubt the news will be a surprise—it may even be a relief. I tramp up the driveway to the front door, shivering in the cold, leaving dark boot-prints that will be filled in a matter of minutes by the freshly falling snow, erasing any traces of me.