Exit- U2

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by theclarenceprinciple

by theclarenceprinciple

The Last Townhouse (Sept. 14th, 2014)

((a/n also a repeat sorry orz orz orz))

I received some surprising news on Saturday morning. I would have just as well received it Friday night, had I not just returned from a football game late at night.

My mother told me that while I was away, an ambulance, firetruck, the whole shebang, pulled into the parking lot of the townhouses directly across the street from us. The rescuers broke into the sixth and last townhouse and came back out with a dead body.

It was discovered through some means that this was the body of the woman who lived alone there. She had OD'd and her body lay in her home for two whole days before someone called the police to get her place checked out.

Two whole days. TWO DAYS my parents and I were living across the street from a dead woman. I can nearly imagine her last breathes, shallow, unsteady, tightening her chest as her heart slower, slowed, stopped. Lying on her bedroom floor, drug of choice in one limp hand, hair splayed around her head like a puddle and her eyes. Her empty eyes watching her ceiling fan go round and round carelessly, unaware of her numb regret. And everything is cold (the air conditioning was on, the townhouse owners said, so the room doesn't smell too bad now) and soon her skin is cold too. Now she's gone.

Today my dad said he looked at the last townhouse and saw the windows open. Someone said it's because they need to air the place out. The body was there for the two hottest days of last week, so you can only imagine.

When does a dead person become a dead body? When do we stop saying "the woman was dead for two days before being found" and start saying "the dead body rotted for two dahs before it was removed"?

Who loved this woman? Who became devastated by her drug addiction, then her death? Who will be at her funeral?

I won't. I didn't know her. But she was my neighbor.

I don't know how her body was found, or what her name was, or even what she looked like, but she was my neighbor, and that is such an odd thing to think about.