I wake up and you still aren’t there, just a cold patch on the mattress where no body warmed it. For a brief instant I forget everything, I wonder if you’re asleep on the sofa again, feel that familiar flare of anger that you don’t care, don’t think -

And then a year’s worth of memories flood into my brain like burning oil, and I’m sorry and I miss you and I need you all over again.

That’s why I didn’t sleep in our bed. Why I tried to burn the mattress. The one situation I feared the most, the confrontation of the howling agony I’m in, all in one instant of misery.

Really don’t need to drink any more. I stagger out of bed, brushing sand out of my eyes, wondering if I’ve been crying in my sleep again. I brush my teeth thinking the wine was contaminated with something. Made me hallucinate, see what I wanted to see rather than what was there.

Cause you’re dead and I’ve got a letter to prove it.

Toni, a therapist friend, would say that I saw you because I was about to burn the mattress. Even saw another me, heard her shouting at you about the Sandy. The other me looked taller, stronger, at ease. 

Wonder what she does?

And Toni would say that the other me was some manifestation of myself beyond my grief. That she was walking away from you. And then she would tie herself in knots trying to get the dog to mean something, like fidelity or duty, or something equally fatuous.

I feel stupid even thinking about it now. I was drunk, seeing things. Lead astray by my weakness for you, my wishful thinking actually affecting my eyes, my ears. And my feelings roil like my stomach, a bubbling pit of piss and acid.

I know I’m going to spend all day looking for you.

I start on the sofa. That’s were you would have slept. I’m pulling back the cushions and delving into the armrests, finding dust and old dog hair and loose change. Before I know it, I’ve moved the sofa over and am looking at the underneath, but find only the un-extraordinary that the vacuum cleaner’s missed. I check to DVD player, the telly channels. The CD player. The paper bin by my desk. Nothing again and again. Not a sign that another you exists, even though I saw you, even though I know you are dead and I shouldn’t be looking anyway. I stand up in a trashed living room, try to calm myself. Maybe I should just get some breakfast, call work, do house work.

Maybe then the evidence will just jump out at me.

The garden’s still just a garden from the kitchen window. It rained, and more clouds threaten more. I don’t taste my cereal, or smell my coffee. I can feel the edges of some great big darkness pulling me in, a despair I won’t escape from. The fridge begins to buzz, and my eyes graze the kitchen counter, where I see -

A ring-pull.

You always pulled off the ring-pulls, fiddled with the cans between sips. Drove me nuts. I was aways finding them and binning them, and nagging you, and you’d just smile that lop-sided smile. You once collected thirty ring-pulls over a week, and wore them on a key-ring, showing them off like it was an achievement, jangling them like a purse full of gold. Were you trying to show me how strong the self-destructive urge was? How you knew it was bound to end badly? How …?

But on the kitchen counter, right now, a single ring-pull. 

There’s no earthly reason it could be there. I’ve not had beer in the house for a year. No-one has visited, and I usually drink wine. 

But it’s there.

It sits near the edge, at an angle, like you dumped it down on the way to the fridge for another one. My coffee has gone cold before I move, eyes blinking like I’ve forgotten how. The mug makes too loud a noise as I put it down. I walk to the counter and pick it up. 

Sandy walks into the kitchen, drinks from a bowl of water on the floor, by the sink, a bowl that clearly isn’t there. Then she walks out again as if she hadn’t seen me.

I gulp. 

But somehow, wonderfully, she’s real. I can see the drips of water that fell from her muzzle as she walked past me. I dip my finger into one, and its wet, and cold, and smells of dog.

She was real, yesterday was real, and somewhere, you’re here.