This is what Charlotte writes.

09.27.07

The shelf of polaroids is gathering dust…it gathers on the glossy surfaces, in the cracks of the small knicknacks brought back from trips to China and to Rome, and on top of the letters that were never sent.

Smile! She’s grinning at me though the viewfinder, blonde hair glowing in the summer sun. I click the button and the camera whirrs and spits out a photo, gray and nothing like the golden afternoon surrounding us. Before it develops I snatch it and stow it in my pocket, which is already bursting with the day’s harvest.

I don’t look at them. Then, I was saving them for later. When later came I couldn’t bear to see their now-revealed images, because I was scared of hurting.

When the film runs out and the sun starts to sink behind the trees we return to our homes, promising to meet again the next morning for tea in the garden, because summer’s ending and we have yet to perform this annual ritual. As I walk through the door I hardly see where I’m going, my mind is already in the kitchen where I’ll be baking scones and sandwiches and miniature cupcakes for tomorrow.

Something about the stillness of the house stops me. It’s completely silent, which is unusual for this late in the day. Missing is the sound of my mother banging pots, my dad and brother throwing the football in the back yard, the twins playing in the living room. My house is a vaccuum, completely devoid of life.

I’m suddenly terrified. Not of being alone, but at the reason for why I am alone. There is no reasonable explanation. I pace, inventing scenario after scenario, each more elabourate, tragic, and implausable than the one before. My whole family is being roasted alive by South Pacific cannibals wearing George W Bush masks when they all troupe through the door, laughing, giggling, carrying the fixings for a barbeque.

“Sorry, sweetie,” my mom says, “The lines at the store were longer than we expected. Downtown is a zoo! I cannot wait for the tourist season to be over.” I start to laugh weakly at my own overimaginativness, and start for the phone to call up Charlie and tell her what had happened, but when I pick up the receiver it rings before I can dial.

“Hello?” As I listen to the voice on the other end I learn what it feels like to have the colour drain from my face.

I know that my mom took the phone from my hand, that I sunk to the floor and did not move, did not speak, did not breathe for hours. Days. Weeks. Months. Years.

And now I live in a museum of other people’s lives, gathered from flea markets, garage sales, and thrift stores, a motley collection of what my life might have been like. No one who has ever said that they cannot live without another has known what that means. Words tossed with pseudo emotion and without thinking.

The Polaroids are gathering dust. I set another letter on the pile, and count off another year of the last day of my life.