I Wait For Death Like A Soldier's Wife

His favorite dessert was key lime pie and he didn’t like sweets. But we got donuts every Saturday to rot away our teeth.

Rotting.

That’s what I’ve been doing.

Taking my feelings and putting them on ice while my body suffers. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I don’t know if I ever will.

I’m running on empty because I am empty. After all, I can’t fill my own cup as it is bottomless. Water goes in and immediately comes out. Nothing sticks around out of fear that I may miss it once it’s gone.

My mouth is dry and scratchy and my body is covered in bugs. Emotionally I’m six feet under the ground while physically I’m in my full sized bed that suddenly feels too big where at the beginning of the year it felt too small.

I’m rotting away in my brain but sitting in the library answering emails. A living dead girl, that’s me. No matter where I am, bugs crawl on me. I no longer wonder if the tickle on my arm is my hair or a bug because, in the end, it doesn’t matter. One is a part of me that died, and the other is curious if my decomposing sensation is a reality.

I spray the bugs with bleach to cleanse myself of the feeling of his touch. To scrub him out of me down to the deepest level of my skin; if I could send my flesh to a dry cleaner for a deep cleaning, I would.

Cut me up piece by piece for a tune-up by professionals. Clean the bugs out of my system and exfoliate my nervous system. Put me back together so I am a better version than I once was. Clean. Pure. Debugged.

But I cannot throw myself in a deep cleaner and come out the most ideal version of myself. I cannot hook myself up to a program and debug my brain. I am a fallible sack of bones, flesh, and allegedly thoughts that are preprogrammed for survival, yet my main predator is myself.

So I feed the bugs key lime pie. They don’t know what it means or understand why I’m crying. They just know that once I’m asleep, the apartment is theirs, and I am no longer a threat. I’m their natural enemy and my own.