I decided to write a poem. I had never written a poem before, but that's what people did when they were sad, wasn't it? Write poems?

I had never read a happy poem, I knew that. Of all the millions of poems written since the onset of the Industrial Age and the subsequent birth of the Modern World, only six have been happy. Six little happy poems, all in a row, unsung, unloved, unread. No one likes a happy poem.

On the wobbly desk was a small notebook and a blue pen. I took these to the bed and wrote, Sleeping lightly like a fragile fallen leaf sits in a hole between breezes these days. Then I tore the sheet out of the notebook, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash with the Gideon Bible. I went back to the bed and got the notebook and pen, and threw those in the trash, too. In the drawer of the wobbly desk was a phonebook, which I threw in the trash.

Bored, well-rested, and in the middle of the night, I considered the ridiculous and ancient tv for the second time. I decided as I looked at it that I would never watch it or another tv again. The decision felt momentous to me, like I was changing my life. I imagined that, after sufficient time, my brain would change, that the veil would fall from my eyes and I would be able to see things as they really are. Television is chewing gum for the mind. Whatever would it do with itself with nothing to chew on?

I went through the clothes she packed me and found a pair of socks I never wore. They were long, almost hose, coming up to my knees. They were stupid socks and I never wore them and they were always way in the back of my drawer. Why did she pack these? I wondered, and threw them in the trash with the poem I didn’t write and everything else. She packed me basic toiletries, but the charger for my phone wasn’t there. At the very bottom of the second gym bag, underneath everything else, she put a little cross-stitch bib she’d been working on for the baby. It was unfinished, obviously, and brought back to me in a flood all of her adorable nesting, not only her cross-stitching, but her baby-proofing plans, the different cans of paint for the nursery she never got to open.

We were going to name him Raymond Douglas, after our fathers, even though we didn’t yet know the sex. They both left us when we were little, like most dads do these days, but we were going to name him that anyway. They had been divorced and cast aside, turned into child support and weekend babysitters, semi-parents, but we really wanted to name him that anyway.

Raymond Douglas. He made it just ten weeks, then turned to blood and pain.