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Inspired by Jennifer Dawson
It's easy to find unhappiness in this world. It's everywhere you look. For me, it was in my harpy of an ex, in the emptiness of the house now that the children were gone. It was in how much my daughter sounded like her mother when we talked on the phone, and the way she crossed her arms and rolled her eyes during the awkward hours of visitation. It was in how my son looked at me, and all the things that bitch must have said to make him scowl that way. It was in the job I hated, and as if packaging cigarettes wasn't bad enough, it was in the way the boss was a master in the art of being a prick.
Mostly, though, it was in the silence. I spent my nights in silence and eventually my mind would wander. Sometimes to the bottle, but mostly to the gun in the locked cabinet in the upstairs hall as though its presence made it just a matter of time.
I can't tell you what it's like to die, really. I pulled the trigger and barely had the time to hear the bang before it was all over and I jolted awake wondering where the hell I was (and that was pretty close, but not quite). It took a second to remember. I wished that I didn't. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to go back to sleep, to catch the tail of the life I'd been dreaming. I couldn't, of course. What's done is done, and I'd woken myself up. The dream was gone.
There was only fog. Like how it is in the morning sometimes, but usually by nine o'clock the day's just as pretty as you please. It doesn't clear here, though, these lingering vapors of melancholy, gray and listless. It'll never clear. And I'll be right here to watch it never clear. Just me and the silence.
It gives me lots of time to think, to try to recapture the dream. It was like the fog drew all the sadness and misery out of my life, and it settled in the air, but left me none to remember. I saw my wife smiling, feeding me crunchy cake and laughing because she'd used the wrong kind of sugar for the frosting. I could almost remember how it tasted.
I could see my daughter riding her tricycle down the sidewalk, my son toddling behind her, trying to keep up. He fell and she swerved so fast to help him that she fell too, but they were too busy laughing at each other to cry. I saw them in water wings, splashing back and forth in the summer sun. I saw fireworks reflected in their eyes. I remembered birthdays and picnics and holidays, and what it felt like to have sex. I remembered the smell of happiness, the taste of love. And I realized that happiness would have been easy to find in that world, if that's what I'd been looking for.
The dream grows vague, but never forgotten. I can't remember the children's names or what came between me and my wife, whose name I have also lost. She's the lady in the hat, now. Maybe after a while she'll just be the dream lady, then the lady, then nothing at all.
Even after what must have been a long time it keeps coming back to me the way a dream does. A half remembered feeling, an image that's there and then gone. It won't let me forget that I've done this. I've woken myself up. Regret hangs on the fog, permeates my skin, thrives in my mind where everything else withers. I wonder if I'll ever sleep to dream again. I'm very tired, you know, but the fog is there, even when I close my eyes.
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