My hands trembled at the softspoken words. They were meant as encouragement, but only served to bring me close to tears again.

          I breathed and concentrated on stilling my hands. It took as much control as I had. I would not cry.

          Exhausted, I lay on the couch instead of sitting. Sitting might be more than I could handle.

          There was nothing I could do. My hands began to tremble again, and I quickly quenched that thought. Of course I could do something. I could always do something.

          I searched for something to occupy my hands, distract me. There was a box of toothpicks, left from last night’s party. I began to build a house.

          Instead of corners, the house had toothpick points sticking out, but their edges lay easily one on the next.

          The toothpicks were getting low. It would be a very wide, flat house, I decided, and began to lay toothpicks flat across the top for a roof.

          I lay each layer of the house so meticulously that it ended up almost perfectly straight, and I admired my work.

          Light groped its way across the carpet, up the table’s leg, and onto the table itself as I worked. Now, as I looked up, it was in my eyes. I moved, leaving my project to be bathed in light.

          Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

          Poetry would not help now. It would not help me to rage, and the person it might have helped had not. The light is dead and gone.

          I watched the sun set from the safety of my couch.

          I tried to think about anything but the one thing I wanted to think most about. I turned on the radio, but the sirens played an echoing symphony in my head.

          I don’t know if I can make it on my own. I don’t know if I can handle any more softspoken voices. I don’t know what I can do. I don’t know how to escape, I don’t know how to be here. I don’t know anything.

          I turn on the TV and turn off my brain. Everything I watch is about her. None of it is real. But I have stopped thinking again. Numb.

          I heard her, she was just out of the corner of my eye, laughing at something on TV. But I knew she wasn’t there. I fell asleep on the couch, trying not to feel alone.

          I always felt alone. It had never scared me before.

          The deep blue of midnight permeated my consciousness at some point and I woke, only to hear the anxious chirping of crickets and the distant hum of streetnoise.

          Sirens echoed louder in the quiet. I turned on the lights and their electric hum drowned the noise a little.

          I needed to talk. I didn’t know if I could. But the phone rang, and I needed to answer, to hear and be heard. As if that was the only way to drown out everything.

          I didn’t tell Amie about what had happened. I acted as if nothing was wrong. I would tell her eventually, I promised myself, she was too happy to tell her now. I felt real again.

          I went on with life, partly because I had to, partly because I knew there wasn’t anything better I could do. I told the few people I needed most and wondered, was I needed?

I didn’t know how to help. I didn’t know how even to help myself. It wasn’t good to hide. I felt better with people who knew.

          But sometimes I hear the sirens and my hands start to shake.