Some nights we could look at each other when she said it.

I kept saying I was sorry. Mom, I’m so sorry.

She said it was all right, it was okay.

It wasn’t.

* * *

For five months and twenty-nine days after she died, I left the house only to deal with probate lawyers, sell her car, and buy beer and occasional groceries. I still needed regular food, too, apparently. Not that I was eating much. I tried to waste away on my own. I became my own ghost, again. I’ve always been my own ghost (or my own ghoul, self-consuming, all-consuming). Like in the summer of ’89, I haunted my own house, drifting around the first floor like I was broken, listening until I didn’t hear any sounds I wanted to hear. There was nothing to hear.

* * *

Why did I never get or ask for help?

Who would help me?

Who would’ve possibly helped me?

What would their help look like?

Who would believe me?

Who would believe in me?

Who wouldn’t say, “I believe that you believe this is happening”?

Sometimes I think about dying, despite how far away it now seems, despite its contiguity, and it brings temporary relief because I think, At least then I won’t have to worry about any of this. This way in which I fantasize about dying is utterly ridiculous. I imagine it as akin to staying in bed all morning with my eyes closed, sometimes dozing, sometimes awake, and I’m able to see how people react to my passing, to see how the world shrugs and goes on without me. I invariably fast-forward to when everyone and everything that ever was is gone, except for me, because I’m still there to witness the sacred nothingness. Then, still in this fantasy, I come back to the now and I wake up, longing for a do-over armed with foreknowledge.

If I ever think about real dying (and I do and I have for as long as I can remember, usually at night and in bed, when dying feels close, as though it might be a tap on the shoulder, a whisper in an ear), I get scared. Quivering, whimpering scared. Overwhelmed. Even now. Even after everything that has happened to me and all that I’ve done.