The good things in life make me age, like cigarettes and suntans, whiskey and one-night stands, painkiller dinners and glazed donut breakfasts. I hope in the end I can still remember those good things, instead of the fifty-hour work weeks or the thousands of nights I spent sleeping alone. When the devil comes for me, I’ll probably have forgotten my childhood. All the pretty sunsets. My very favorite songs. But I guess it could be worse; I could have ended up a homeless war veteran, or a soiled trophy on a shelf, or unloved. Existence alone makes me age, but I endure life like long lines at the DMV. I sit and I wait with my ticket in hand for the laminated card that never quite looks like me in the photo.

All the ones I’ve ever loved are gone. Some are buried beneath grass and granite or hidden inside airtight urns, sealed away from air and from me. There were some I got rid of before the expiration date; tossed them aside like a careless re-gift. Some I ignored, some I avoided; left things unfinished like a homework assignment. But the ones I wanted to keep the most, the few that still burden my memory, are those who were stolen from me forever, and let into other people’s lives. They walk the parks and city blocks holding hands with strangers. They never know I still think of that time on the boardwalks of Atlantic City; or that I kept the perfumed, paisley sweater left behind in the backseat of the Buick. Folded smartly, it stays tucked in the closet between the hat boxes and mothballs, waiting.

I scoop all the loved ones up in a fishnet inside my head. They dangle loosely amongst the seaweed and the pearls. Their ghosts haunt me in my bed of stiff insomnia pillows, until drink after drink breaks apart their molecules and they begin to disperse and evaporate. The sleepless hours creep like a thief until dusty rays of morning slice through the bed sheet curtains. And just when I think I’ve swilled enough to sink past the dreams to the bottom like a stone, the blackbirds fly to me. They come to sit on the telephone wires above my window so they can taunt me with their chatter and chips. I lay and I wait and after long I can’t take it, so I lurch to the pane and yell, “Damn birds, get outta here!” But I can’t scare them away. They squawk and they caw right into the bedroom, keeping me from sleep.

I pick up the pen.

I get it all down before I’m too old or too senile to remember anything.

The pen picks me up.

It saves a little of what’s left of the good things I keep inside.

Meghann Jones is a part-time, online psychology student at Drexel University. She has a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Temple University.