Another piece written 5+ years ago, for my zine, which is now an e-book, but I didn’t put this piece in the e-book. Disclaimer note that this is short fiction.

The only thing my mother left that day was the dirty dishes in the sink. I’ve wondered about that for years. If you plan to kill yourself while your kids are at school––if you plan to go down in the basement and hang yourself from a rafter––why do you clean the whole house from top to bottom, finish the laundry, put everything exactly in its place––but then leave the dirty dishes in the sink? It’s just bizarre. She didn’t leave a note, which was also a little bizarre, considering how meticulous she was generally. All that was left was an immaculate house with dirty dishes in the sink. And if you plan to kill yourself, why would you do it when you know it will be your children that find you? I mean, come on. We come home from school to an empty house and assume that Mom is running errands. Grab Nilla Wafers from the cupboard. Argue over whose turn it is to do the dishes. Go down to the basement to find the football––and there’s your mother, looking like a grotesque parody of a piñata. It was like some major kind of fault line in Time, with the dishes sitting there between Before and After. Sometimes I could hear her talking, behind a closed door, through the phone just hung up; leaving a message on the answering machine just erased. We all drifted around the house like ghosts, pale and sad, and I felt like there was more than one death lurking in the corners of the house. Nobody wanted to touch the dishes. They sat there for days. I came downstairs to find food at three in the morning, and the light when the refrigerator door opened threw the dishes into sharp relief, dark shadows high on the wall. And suddenly I hated her, hated the continual reminder, hated reaching back to the time of Before. Without realizing it, I hurled her dishes against the wall, shattering, exploding.
I want to destroy you, destroy myself, banish the ghosts that haunt my every step, every movement, every thought. Shatter your image out of every cup and saucer. I will take the jagged shards and carve your name on my wrist so that with every beat of my pulse I can kiss you, every single beat for the rest of this life you left me in. This dark and interminable place where at any moment I will trip and fall into an abyss, a pit from which nothing returns. And I recognize it now, the pit that you fell in, and I don’t know if I can avoid it. I don’t know if I want to. And the only reason I don’t is because I hate you. I loved you so much and it never made a difference; I want to stop loving you so much because then the hate will stop too. It’s a good thing you’re dead because if I saw you again, I might kill us both.