A Year In Prose

Spike- 210
Stephen N. Dethrage

A familiar phantom feeling arose when I parked at the house you once lived in again today. A sense of displacement and oddity that resulted from dwelling too long on the idea that you no longer live inside the home I stopped by. For only a moment, a moment that was like a sudden spike on a flat-lined EKG, I imagined you sitting inside, watching the television or surfing the web or having some cereal, and everything was normal, but you are no longer within, and the heartbeat of what once was stops again. I let myself in the back, the way you once showed me, so that I didn't need the code for the realtor's lockbox on the front door. Once inside, the only things that awaited me inside were ancient things, and buried things. A memory of the sound the floor made, the way your bedroom smelled, the color of your bathroom walls. You're gone, and I know that, but the realization is still an alien thing to me, and standing where we used to stand, then collapsing to my knees and crying like I always do, I am left alone with a long history of memories, and phantom feelings, and those damned spikes, few and far between.