“Life.” That word. You still use it all the time, “get a life,” “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” it’s still a part of your…your existence. And your existence…feels…like life. You still think. You still feel, not pain, feelings, emotions. You still have conversations with people about the weather. It’s just like life. Well, except you can walk through doors, and you wear the same clothes all the time. Which, to tell you the truth, is not a bad thing.

But because it’s like life…it’s hard to let go of your life. The real one. Because you’re still the same and you still…care…about the same things…but you can’t, exactly, because you’re gone. And you have to find a way to…stop. Caring. Or…not stop caring, but you have to…grieve yourself, I guess, and move on. Move on from what you used to know, because you have to. But it takes time.

It takes time to even realize that you’re still holding on, or that you shouldn’t be anymore. The others, they tried to tell me…maybe you shouldn’t keep going back to the house, they said. Maybe you should…stay here at night. Maybe you should go with Vincent for a change of pace. They could see I wasn’t letting go, and…I was going back to my old house, to see my wife. Every night. Every night. Looking in the window.

At first…it felt like…the thing to do. I would stand on one side of the window and look into the den, and Bets would be on the other side, on the couch…we could miss each other together. It helped, at the time, I thought. I thought maybe one night, she would…that there would be…I don’t know what I thought, exactly. That things didn’t have to change, I suppose…it’s hard to say. One night, Mrs. Wallace and I were walking out together, it was the first cool night at the end of the summer, and I said that I could smell a little winter, and she told me that I should enjoy it. I told her, well, yes, I am enjoying it, and she said, “Then enjoy it.” And I didn’t know what that meant, which I told her. And she said…she said I should enjoy it for myself, not save it up to tell someone else. And I said, who would I tell? And she said she didn’t know.

I walked over to the house that night, like I always did. Betsy wasn’t home. I waited for a while, but she didn’t come home, and at midnight I walked back, and that little smell of winter…it’s the kind of thing I would have said, noticed out loud, and she would have leaned forward and clasped her hands together and said, yes. I smell it too. Me too.

Then the for-sale sign went up on the front lawn. Six months had gone by. And I knew…that Betsy was trying to let go. We always said, you know, if one of us dies…no promises. You know, in bed late at night. But you don’t think it’s you who’s going to die first, when you say those things. You think it’s you who sells the house, packs up the clothes, turns your back on…what was.

And I wanted that, for her. I thought I did. But the sign went up, and I thought, how…how does this happen? How can she turn her back on me when I walk up here every night, when I have no one…no place else to be? Maybe if I shouted or banged on the window. If she saw me. If she knew, she wouldn’t…if she knew I was here, she wouldn’t let go. But she did. She had to. And so did I, because…what would I have told her, if I could have told her something? That…I still loved her? That if I weren’t already dead, this…would kill me, probably? It didn’t matter. There was…nothing I could do. She left town, I think. And I had to let go, then. Of her, of everything, what I used to do, what I knew before. Because it didn’t matter anymore. Except to pass the time.

Everyone…everyone goes through it, I think. I think I was…lucky, that Betsy moved, I think I would have kept going up there, kept watching her, kept feeling like…I had something to do with her, when I didn’t. Which…I hate. But…well.

Stevie and I walked the same route for a while, when I first came here. I’d turn right onto Evergreen to go back up to my old house, and she’d stop at the T, go across the intersection and up onto the sidewalk, and she’d stand there on the sidewalk, facing the houses. Just stood there. When people wonder why…I don’t know why. I don’t know what’s there for her. Or who. But I understand. Whoever it is in that house…whoever it used to be, she needs to…think they’re still together, somehow. That some things are the way they were. Besides your clothes, that is.

My name is Russ Penny. I died of a gunshot wound March 20, 2000.

December 15, 2003

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