Grief

Assignment 3
First Person Narrator - disspasionate & detached narrator describing a passionate subject at a time in his life when he felt altererd.

From September last year, I did nothing else but grieve her death. Oh, I went through the motions of some “regular” life, mimicking past actions but it was all dupery. I would wake in the morning, well, wake is a choice word because I never fully woke, and I would find some clothes, brush my teeth, leave my paper on the doorstep, because who needed news when your wife was dead, and walk to work. I would log into my computer, check my mail on Outlook and stare. I would stare deep into the computer looking for some sort of respite, gazing endlessly. My coworkers smiled small smiles and kept their eyes hooded from seeing me, probably afraid my heartache would find them and they would be unable to escape. I wished to be them, to be able to walk away from me.
My routine was this: I would go to work and I would come home. I lost all sorts of things: my scarf, my phone, my wallet, my other scarf. Nothing was important enough to keep track of. No one expected much of me. Phone calls were returned or they weren’t. I would try and make dinner plans or movie plans with friends but I mostly cancelled last minute. I would go into our fully stocked kitchen at work, searching for nourishment, opening cabinets, closing them, opening the refrigerator, closing it. It all looked bland, tasteless. And then I would just stand, in the middle of our kitchen, and wonder if I would ever be hungry again. Would I ever long for the taste of an apple, a piece of chocolate, some warm spaghetti again? I would order fresh juices off Seamless Web, hoping a drink would be easier to swallow than solid food. Grief filled my throat and traveled to my stomach, blocking any type of entry.
My boss told me to take some more time. They would manage without me just fine. But I attempted to keep going to work because home was worse. Our home was worse. I slept on the couch watching some Christian channel hoping for God Almighty to reach through the screen and hold my broken heart in His large, healing hands but I didn’t believe in God and not because she died, but because I was practical. But I still prayed and prayed, maybe out loud sometimes, to something. All I wanted to do was sleep and go to the only place that could take me away from the truth. But, I couldn’t sleep. I was constantly slipping my hand down my pants, jacking off to some faceless woman with a blurry body. I would come but it was never ecstatic. I would take 1 mg of Klonopin to help ease my mind. That quickly turned to 2 mg and so forth. Whatever.
I started frequenting the pub by my apartment that my wife and I used to call gross. Happy hours (happy in only the title alone) were spent talking with strangers that never delved too deep and kept subjects at a very surface level. I would drink more beers and shots of whiskey than I could count and lose my self-awareness. Several nights I got so drunk that I would wake in my bed. I did not sleep in my bed since my wife had gone. It contained her smell, a faded mix of vanilla and sweat, weaved into the soft sheets. Strands of her hair, fine and dark brown, still lined the pillow she had slept on, holding on tight to the fibers. I would get sick and spend the afternoon wrapped around the toilet, a contraption so disgusting, people hide it away in its own room to not be spoken of. I would weep on the unsympathetic tile floor, legs cramping from sitting awkwardly, bloodshot eyes streaming with water, head thumping like a teacher was hitting me upside the head with a measuring stick, letting the vomit out. Letting the alcohol escape up the hole in which it came, emptying the contents of my stomach, but I was still full of misery.