[I could almost hear her
talking to me. She was near me or around me, next
to me or holding me still. But she was gone too and
I hadn't taken enough of her sleeping pills with me
or I wasn't close enough to dying to go with her yet.
But I wanted to get my wife back.
I turned the arms on all of the clocks in all of the rooms of our house
back. I rolled the number of the date on my watch
back to a day that she was alive on. I got some old
calendars out and hung them up on the walls. I called
up the old telephone numbers at the places where we
used to live. I looked out the back window and into
the backyard until I could see back to years ago.
I kept looking behind me, but I couldn't find her
standing back there anymore either.]
She wasn't living in the living
room or getting up off of the couch or out of our bed
or taking a shower or fixing breakfast or making lunch
or eating dinner or eating out or going out. She wasn't
answering the telephone or listening to the answering
machine or calling anybody back or sitting in the backyard
or breaking a glass or taking her glasses off or the
trash out or rinsing her toothbrush out or putting her
lipstick on or washing her face or her hands.
She wasn't standing in the doorway
or reading a book or looking out the window or at me
or at old photographs or listening to old records or
turning the radio on and dancing slow dances by herself
or looking at herself in the bathroom mirror or brushing
her teeth or her hair or touching her make-up up or
tucking strands of hair behind her ear. She wasn't picking
an outfit out or matching her bra to her panties or
pulling her shirt on over her head or tucking her blouse
down into her waistband or bending down to tie her shoelaces
up.
She wasn't rearranging the furniture
or preheating the oven or turning the stove on or microwaving
anything frozen or waving goodbye or buying a book or
a newspaper or a magazine or pumping gasoline or driving
our car away down the highway or riding her bike up
the driveway or running through the backyard or walking
through the living room.
She wasn't looking through the
cupboards or locking the windows and the doors or sweeping
and mopping the floors or mowing the lawn or doing the
laundry or folding the clothes or closing the blinds
or shading her eyes or turning the lights off or lighting
matches or planting flowers or watering plants or drinking
water or mixing drinks or fixing her hair-do up or doing
the dishes or stripping our bed down or unbuttoning
her shirt or her blouse or unzipping her pants or her
skirt or rolling her nylons down her legs.
She wasn't turning the air on or the heat down or
falling down and breaking her arm and her hip or getting
up or waking up or standing up or sitting down in
any armchair or climbing up the front steps or walking
up the sidewalk or setting out place settings or sitting
down at the dinner table or saying my name or touching
my arm or my hair or my face or forgetting my name
or my face or looking away or taking her pills or
going to the doctor or the hospital or trying to sit
up and eat or drink or talk or breathe.
