One-Thousand-and-One American Nights

Day #1.

It was a mountain-top road with a guardrail old enough to have witnessed the Donner party's descent into madness. (It has no remorse about remaining unhelpful.) She crashed at 9:05 p.m., the same time church bells rung three days later in Sacremento, her home town of 10 years. We met four years earlier, had been dating through school, and this was the night. Obviously, because this is how it has to be: that night was the night with the question mark attached to it. The biggest one of all.

"Will you...?"

It hasn't rained since her death. It has been almost impossible to not enjoy the summer California days. Remind me, when I die, to make it in winter, when it's easier to mourn. I go to the beach most days, surf out on the waves, and some how manage to stay awake most of the night to stop the possibility of nightmares. I am a zombie of sorts, though my taste for brains hasn't quite matured to violence.

I feel split. In the daytime, sanity reigns. Despite my lack of sleep, I maintain a calm, polished veneer, dress adequately, and attend church on Sunday's (though I'm forming a new religion of sorts.) The shift happens, like flipping a pancake, with the drowning and surfacing of the sun. (Funny thing that: it never burns out, and it breaks free from the mountains every morning without effort. Oh to have such strength... which I seem to have these days.)

Her ghost has colors, which I've seen on my bedroom wall, and her spirit has voices, which are like childhood friends and the people you meet in concert lines and on roller coaster rides. I sleep in her bedroom, climbing in through the window the with the purposely broken lock, and I listen to music only a 17 year old should. I am allowed to. I have a dead almost fiancee. I am allowed to.

I am 23.