When she walks in the front door, there is nobody there.
At first, that was a relief. He wasn’t there anymore, and she didn’t have to pretend that she was glad to see him. She didn’t have to pretend that she was the cheerful person he married. After a year, though, her apartment, tiny, started to feel huge. She felt like she could never be enough of anything to fill the space. She felt even more empty than the apartment.
Maybe, she thought, there is still nobody here now, and closed the door behind her.
It’s pretty easy to pretend to be someone while she is at work. She is busy and useful. She can make herself smile because so many of the people there have so much more to be sad about than she does. They are really there, in their lives, hanging on. If she feels anything at all, she feels bad that she wants to let go of her life when they are all fighting for theirs.
Each night leaving work, she asks herself how many days she would be dead before anyone noticed. She knows what the answer is, but she still asks the question. It’s the number of days before she has to go back to work. Someone would miss her on that day at 07:05. Not before. When she is not working, she does not exist for anyone.
She does exist, of course, but she has lost touch with the place inside of herself where she can feel it.
She drives home each night, somehow, without driving her car into a wall. Off an overpass. She doesn’t know how many more nights she can keep her car on the road. The only thing she really wants to do is hit a wall. Crash into a tunnel and explode. She reads about people who die, and she thinks it must be peaceful not to have to pretend to be someone. Then she thinks of her mother, and decides to stay for another day.
One more day.
She stops pretending she is OK. She isn’t sad anymore. She isn’t lonely anymore. She isn’t anything anymore. She isn’t anyone.
Her friends and colleagues worry about the missing smile. The missing laughter. The empty eyes. They try to talk to her but she isn’t there so she can’t hear them.
She floats back and forth between work and her empty apartment over 300 acres of lonely. Resisting the call of the overpasses and concrete walls. Picking up a bottle of pills and putting it back down.
Every day.
One at a time.