It’s like nothing in this world ever sleeps. I creep through the dark house he had inhabited till so recently. Still the coffee *** is stained with dark, rich, brown streaks, it looks as if it had just been used this morning. I can picture his gaping lips slightly closing around the chipped rim of his favorite mug, thick steam rising up the sides of the cup continuing up into his nose, his eyes, his ears, slowly dissipating as it collides with the solid jaw bone of his face. God, the dripping from the sink is enough to make anyone crazy, the rhythmic plop, plop, plop as the liquid collides with the cold, dark, steel basin. The house is alive, his energy engulfs me just as his perfect cigarette stem fingers used to, but the sensation becomes over powering and I gasp for breath. I gasp for the oxygen that has somehow forced its way up, out of my lungs. Stumbling to the door I spill out in a heap on the front lawn. I look up and across the street, not more than one hundred feet from me is the spot we first met. The pavement now scarred with the ethereal ghosts of what once was, what is, and what is to come. This was the place it all began and it all ended.

-K