I woke up to an empty house

The day after the event I woke up to an empty house. The blinds were drawn, and I half expected to see the roaring highway when I tugged at the blinds and they snapped back. The carpet had been vacuumed. I felt like an intruder and was amazed at the efficiency by which everything had left, unbeknownst to me, in the middle of the night.

I spent the first few minutes getting my bearings. Waking up to an empty house is like starting everything over again, but everything is on fire. It’s a disaster before the incident even happens. Let this be a warning to you: If you can avoid waking up in an empty house do so before you learn what I did that day.

I paced around the house for an hour or so, but what is time when its not there? I paced for reassurance, convinced that if I returned to the room exactly 15 times, that everything would return, much like the faith present in the fool who reboots his computer thinking that a lost document may suddenly return.

We reset our lives to see what happens.

I began, slowly, to panic. It didn’t come over me all at once, it began in my lower ankle and worked its way up to a childlike portion of my chest, where the essence of fear has always lived, it just needed the right circumstance to arise. We don’t become any less fearful as we grow older, it’s just that events change, people change, she changed, and that’s why I sat on the floor, the cold hardwood floor that once housed our futon, loveseat, and my friend the beanbag chair. I was all gone the morning I woke up to an empty house.

I slept on the warmest part of the carpet, above the water heater, which was still on somehow. I dreamt of luxury town homes, of cabins with roaring fires, and Sybil Shepard during the Moonlighting days.

I awoke to the sound of static, loud and piercing. I jumped up, walking in circles around my awe at and this point, fear. Where it could it be coming from? What sort of sick bastard is fucking with me? Were there people in monitors, people behind the glass mirror that I now stood in front of? Who had found me? Was I being observed, and if so what had I done to deserve it? What warranted this sort of treatment?

Peeling away the reflective layer of the mirror did little to alleviate this feeling that came over me, mounting monumentally as I began to realize that the sound had become louder.
Having little else to do, I sat down and tried to reconstruct last night’s argument. How could she have had everything removed overnight, and why? I knew what I said and how I felt, but did I deserve to wake up to an empty house, with only static as a friend.

I hadn’t realized I had been sleeping when the voices ripped me from my sleep, voices rich with baritone and professionalism, comfortable voices, which were put together deliberately. They had instructions, things they wanted me to do. I was to walk down the street and speak to someone whose name was muffled, and the static returned as I begged for an explanation. But the instructions changed.

Now I was to go somewhere else, I was to take off all my clothes and take a hot bath, and take stock of life. I wasn’t supposed to panic, that much was made abundantly clear.

So I did that. I took off my pajamas, top and bottom, folded them up nicely, because they were my only clothes, and I needed to respect something, because I hadn’t respected my wife before, or the things that were in the house that were now gone and holy shit, there was a For Sale sign in the front yard. I saw it, because I didn’t have a shower curtain.

A For Sale sign, but that would require time, this was premeditated, and I could prove it in court. You can’t put a house on the market overnight. The whiskey I had last must have done it. I didn’t normally drink it, but it was a special occasion, she assured me. Yeah, it was special all right, because the next morning I would wake up in an empty goddamned house.

I directly put my pajamas back on, after yelling at nothing but the instructions buried in the static. And as I dripped through the house, walking around trying to pick out the new directions that came as quickly as every thirty seconds, I heard music. Yeah, I thought I heard music. Classical, Brahms, I heard Brahms as the beads of water dripped from my forlorn body down to the floor that we sanded and finished together in the fall of our new marriage.

We put so much into it and now the empty water hung to it closely as the instructions returned again and I dropped to the ground and wept for all the things I’d lost: the strength, the respect, the work had already taken it’s toll. It was too late to go back.

I heard the door open and I ran towards the light it brought with it from the outside and with eyes closed I embraced the Century 21 agent whose color had drained out of him and out of the newly-married couple, you could tell because they were smiling, before I tackled the guy to floor and demanded to know why he left me in an empty house with constantly changing directions and he listened as I told him, in great detail, the many ways I would change if he could just put everything back the way it was.