Cracked Paving

Groundhog Issue

I woke up, she was gone. No note. No message. No wife.

I drove around town, but she had vanished. None of her friends knew where, or at least that’s what they said. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming but didn’t.

It was a year before I saw her again. In the town where her mother lived coming out of a bar with another man. She looked at me and smiled. In my mind, I had rehearsed all sorts of scenarios. I didn’t do any of them. I stared without saying a word.

I didn’t know it then; it was the last time I would ever see her.

I was depressed after she left and considered killing myself. I bought a gun, it was that serious. The same day I bought it I put the barrel to my temple. I wasn’t going to pull the trigger. I wondered what it would be like to be dead.

I still don’t know why I didn’t pull the trigger. My doctor put me on Prozac, but it was jamming up my emotions. I needed to feel grief.

I went to the park and fed Prozac to the pigeons.

Early the next morning, I saw an animal scurrying across my lawn. I didn’t know what it was at first. It looked like a small dog, but later learned it was a groundhog.

I wouldn’t normally, but his underground passageway was breaking my sidewalk. I had tripped and almost broke my arm. The next day, I went out and bought a trap and baited it with apple slices.

I caught it. I was pleased. You little fucker, I said to myself.

The critter sat in the trap, staring at me. It was calm. I don’t know why, but it had accepted its fate. Right then, the Groundhog and I had become intertwined, our destinies predetermined — the random collection of events irrelevant.

From our isolated perspectives, life did not make any sense, and looking for revelations is useless.

I opened the latch and let the fucker go.

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