I was just all screwed up inside, my head and arms, the back of my throat like a fuzzy nickel was lodged between breathing and choking and just when I started to calm down I saw the clock and it all went tohell again. Sometimes the craziest thing about confinement is the solice of knowing no one else can see your face. Time they told me was just something you had to get used to passing you by. It doesn't pay to get upset. That's what they had written on my placemat. My name and this proverb written with a magic marker so it wouldn't come off right away was what I had to look at morning, noon, and night.
It doesn't really pay to get upset, though, to stay awake when you shouldn't, ignore the routine that only yesterday they said you could have, and go your own way because that way doesn't exist any more and you'll only get into trouble.
Pain like ice down your back, voices carrying on the same old song and what do you have to show for it but a complaint here and a sore gut there when all you really needed was the patience to let the sun come up tomorrow.

I mused in sobriety, silently and secretly praying that I was alone. The windows were dark between the stained gray drapery, no sight of my children's children or the annoying doctors who were waiting for me to die so I could prove them right. For a minute I had peace looking through the blue black blur of glass, the whispers coming and going from all the hidden mouths, the way air might meander unobstructed in a room full of people. Yet, I could not get the sound out of my head, the wheezing in and out sound of air that got caught in a constricted, worn out throat. The doctors had said six months. Six months for her, a year for me. They didn't prepare me for what I had to do. No one told me.
"Harvey," she would cry in between fits of hacking and choking. Her broken voice would shake the bed like tiny tremors that never seemed to subside.
I pretended not to hear sometimes. I would hide in whatever closet was furthest away, tucked behind clothes that no one wore, holding my ears like my brains were going to come out of the openings. She called me nevertheless, at all hours of the day and night, throwing whatever was near her good hand, cursing my name and apparently talking directly to Jesus. "Harvey, damn you, Harvey. Damn you to hell. Yes, he will, yes he will."
All I could say was no. "No, dear."
I never knew what time it was except when she was awake. Her voice would carry through that old house as though it were empowered by secret speakers I couldn't ever find. She had a voice like a withered claw, scratching the sides of the bed, the walls, the air, calling my name over and over and over.
"Harvey."
My head floated, freely, heavy like the soured milk in my mouth, the stale flavor of non-dairy creamer or whatever I could find to make the a.m. coffee bearable. It would seem that whenever I tried to find my own space to eat or read or sleep, her voice was there, reaching out from her bed and through the house. I went to sleep with her voice in my head and awoke to it cursing my birth.
Sometimes I didn't know what day it was. She said my name 87 times, once, I counted and I never missed one because I kept a record with two decks of cards that I tossed on the floor. She would call me and then be still for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, but when she said my name again it was louder and more desperate. That was how I kept track of time.
"You're nothing but a damned liar and you'll pay for your sins, Harvey. Do you hear me, Harvey? Jesus is watching me, Harvey, Jesus' watching."
Every now and again I would escape into insanity. I didn't call it that, though you might. Whenever she forgot about me for more than an hour, which was rare, I would slip away into my head and watch the scented smoke of a vague room distill and change color the way a child's face finds amber in a sunset. It was in this safe room in my head that I hid, that I breathed fast and slow with the understanding that I wasn't hungry and I wasn't making food for the garbage can outside the porch.
"Harvey."
But it wouldn't last. No matter how congested her lungs sounded or to what extent she cried my name with blood freckled lips, I went to her side and listened to the way she forgot who I was and scratched my face when I got near.
"Yes, beloved. Yes."

"Dad," my son said moving into the room from the hall. "We're going to go now. Did you need anything?"
I turned away from the window and looked at my son.

When I think of you, not your face or the way you whisper my name when you want to fuck, just the parts that hurt me, I can not sleep. I take pills, sometimes, a handful of aspirin or ibuprofen cause I want to pretend to be normal again. I drink the cherry flavored wine we bought for special times that I keep hidden under the sink next to the cleanser, and it is these nights especially, that I see you in the kind of pain that I know.
It is what every woman wants, a strong love, like you and I had, the kind of partnership that means you share everything, but pain. You made me feel whole when I looked into your charcoal eyes, like parts of me had been dormant and you woke them up. My family didn't even know about us until they heard my drowsy, liquored up voice, half crying to them at two in the morning about killing, and you.
I lost my job because of you. Eventually everything bad that happened to me was your fault. There was nothing for me to do but watch my life, like so many dominoes tumbling, and wait for the last double twelve to click forward onto its face and stir me like the end of a very long game. I couldn't help myself. Whenever a man came in my store, somewhat like you with curly brown hair and a smooth, sharp face, I cried and sobbed and went to pieces.
So here I am, on the couch that we bought on payments, the last one in the mail, and I don't remember when I slept or dreamed I slept well. The paper has started to pile up outside the door, the mail box no longer capable of holding another lube and oil certificate or the last catalog to a company I can't remember subscribing to.
I have no phone because of you. They turned it off when you left without a payment. Now my mother is alone and I can not call to tell her that I am sitting in the same darkness. Sometimes I read by a forty watt bulb next to the window where I watched you become a street post and then nothing at all. I think I can hear the phone below me, or the one that no one answers next door. I hear the phone and it makes me think you are on the other end, breathing, waiting somewhere in the building for me to answer before hanging up.
I hurt and you don't know it. When my stomach burns and my eyes won't open any more, I see your hands at the knuckles, then the wrist, your thumb goring my eyes, your fist in my belly. You wear a tuxedo in my head. Black with tails, or none at all, bare.
I want to have the chance to tell you I'm over you, to look you in the eye and smile away the feeling to choke on your name. So when I bleed and I cuss, I know you are there, on the phone across the room, just out of touch of my voice, my eyes, my jagged fingers that claw your name in everything that I touch.