Isn't it amazing how trivial our lives really are? They're filled with dish washing and tooth brushing and bill paying. We work so hard to pay the bills that we need to keep working, to keep going, to keep buying more things that will fill up the time. I'm still not sure what the point is here.

I feel like a girl "in the hole." My home phone has been out of commission since Monday. No dial tone, can't get or receive calls. Normally the phone will sit there like some small gray monster lurking in the corner, sulky and silent. Now it simply has tape over its mouth, not ringing because it can't, and somehow it doesn't even bother me.

Last night was another blessed night off, spent home with my dogs and my thoughts. I cleaned for a few hours. I flipped through a GMAT book, disinterested. This week Sam's parents stopped over to work in my garage. Sam's step-father is planning on dropping a car and some tools off in the garage. He's restoring an old blue Road Runner.

I now know that I can procrastinate for a year. When the cleaning company came by last December they took my furniture and bagged up the items in our bedroom that were not touched by the splattered blood. The bagged up contents of our closet and dressers have been in the garage since then. $3.57 in pennies, video games, empty CD cases, a Taboo game, one of little Sammy's baby socks, fishing hooks, one silver hoop earring. Strange things were in our closet.

I discovered that my toilet is leaking last night, and I think my dogs have worms. My IKEA bathmat is soaked, so I washed it.

I'm getting my new mattress on Sunday morning. I can finally put my bed together. I haven't slept in a bed in over a year. This time last year I was sleeping on the couch because Sam was camping and I didn't like to sleep in our bed alone. The night he came home we slept on the couch together. The next few weeks I spent sleeping on his parents' couch. In December, when I went back home, it was a futon. I've slept on it ever since, except for that one night that I still feel guilty about, the night I decided to try and see if I could feel anything with someone else.

I couldn't.

So now I have to find someone who knows something about leaky toilets. Should ask my landlord, but he likes his tenants to take care of these things themselves, give him the receipts later. He raised the rent again, told me he had bad news, rising property taxes, rising sewer bills...I was relieved that he didn't say he was selling the house and I had to leave.

Spoke with Sam's mother this morning. She said that Grandpa Dick should be able to look at the toilet. She wants to come over and take the chest freezer that's been squatting in the kitchen for ages, tells me to have Sam's friends get all of their dead animals out of it. I think Frank has a deer head, the turkey is Sam's, don't know what the frozen food is in there. She also wants to go through the basement, go through the rest of Sam's things down there. I've been meaning to get to it first. Some things I want to keep, don't want anyone to know about them.

When the police first let us go back into the house, his family wanted to wait until the cleaners had finished. When they drove me there to pick up some things, the cash out of the dresser, the jewelry, the shoes for the funeral, they ducked under the police tape and followed me in. I was the only one who went in the bedroom. I told Sam's step-father to keep Sam's mother out, it was worse than I remembered. They had their backs turned and started wandering through the rest of the house, looking at the pictures on the refrigerator, his things in the house. I stood in the bedroom with my face pressed to the bloody wall. I didn't want them to clean it. His family was in the livingroom, boxing his things up without asking me if it was ok. Some of the things they took were mine. They still have all of it. While they were taking his die-cast cars and work uniforms and stethoscopes, I grabbed things off of our dresser and shoved them in my pockets like a thief. His class ring, wallet, watch, gold bracelet, blood-stained photos, drink chips from Bamboozles. I wanted to make sure that I had something that he had touched.

This is why I have to get to the basement first, to save what I need before his things are pillaged. I love them, they deserve most of his things. Some of it, though, some of it I'd rather die than part with.

So this is how I pass my time. I'm editing at work with just my computer and my music. When I'm home is just my dogs, my books, and my music.

Sam never understood why I read so much. He always asked me why I wasn't out living life rather than sitting on the couch (or bed, or front steps, or picnic table, or passenger seat of the car) reading about it. I told him that they were like movies, structured delusions, usually better or, at least, different than the real thing. These days they are my life support.

So I guess what I've been realizing this week is that, after next week, I'll no longer be able to say "This time last year..." and follow it with some wonderful or silly memory of something that Sam and I did together. From next week forward it will be something like, "So, yeah, this time last year my toilet was leaking and my dogs had worms."

So this is it, isn't it?