For the first three days I don’t leave the house. I spend them in bed, only getting up to use the bathroom or grab a granola bar from the pantry or pour a glass of water I forget to drink until all the ice has melted and the water grows lukewarm and the glass is sweating, like it just ran a marathon, or it’s stressed out about paying rent, and so the once cold water I poured into the glass tries to run away, and there it goes, the water cascading over the coaster and dripping onto the nightstand. During those first three days I Google hysterical pregnancies. I Google hot dads wearing BabyBjörns. I Facebook stalk all of my ex-boyfriends: four are married, one is engaged, one fell off a mountain, one is halfway to having a kid, one moved to Hollywood and was in a commercial for Crest Whitening Strips, and one doesn't have a Facebook account, which leads me to the assumption he also fell off a mountain. I Google ultrasound pictures. I Google does space cause death? while wondering if anywhere is safe if space isn’t even safe and space is above everything, constantly circling us, slowly swallowing us whole. On day four I dream worry. I dream nineteen black holes. I dream bloody chests and quarters fitting through the side of a missing cheek. I dream I climb through the hole in your throat. It is dark inside your throat. I don’t like it, so I leave. On day five of my furlough there’s a storm, something chopped up and raw and filled with lightning, thunder, tornadoes in my lungs, a tsunami off the coast of my neighbor’s pool, hurricanes forming in the wishing well at the mall—the sky a madness I trace like one of those pages covered with dots spread out inches apart, where you take a pencil and draw lines connecting one dot to another, creating miniature constellations. On day six I wake up to a gasp. On day seven I consider getting in my car and heading north on I-65. Halfway through a state I’ll never see again, I’ll toss my cellphone and half of my clothes out the window. I decide I will become the dictionary of birth. I will teach the world how to start over. I will smile every time a server refills my coffee mug. I will learn how to spell every country in the world. I will start a new life in some small town in Michigan. I’ll buy an old, abandoned lighthouse in this small town in Michigan. I’ll sleep on a single bed I carried up the winding staircase to the top of the lighthouse, and I’ll spend the rest of my days walking along cliffs and the rest of my nights in glow by candlelight, watching a spotlight scan the shoreline.
Leigh Chadwick's writing is forthcoming in Salamander and Milk Candy Review. She is at work on her first novel.