My mind dresses in long black dresses

The tremendously tragic thought of Scott dying has bewitched my brain. The roads are really icy today.

What if there's a school shooting? What if he has some horrible, hidden disease we don't know about and one day he just drops dead?

Putting these thoughts to type frightens me to think that I have jinxed it all into making today the day it happens. Is jinx politically correct? Or is it like saying you got gypped? Because if he died, I would be gypped from having jinxed myself.

I would be a widow. A twenty-six-year old widow. Married not even a year. He, dead after twenty-five incomplete years. He fears time passes too fast for him to keep up with now. If he died, I know he would float around the world staring at people and wondering why he couldn't be among them like Bill Cosby in Ghost Dad.

Part of my fear is that I would have only selfish sadness. What would happen to me, me, me? I would lose my husband, my best friend in the whole wide world, my theater director, my bed mate, the person I wake up early with to make coffee, breakfast and a bagged lunch for, my personal comedian, my love. I would lose all of these people. Numbers that could compete with Hamlet's Act V, scene ii. Everybody in my world: dead, dead, dead.

Ok, it wouldn't be everybody, I have many others. But no one who can wear all of those size-twelve shoes.

I've thought this through so thoroughly, I've actually convinced myself that it is going to happen soon and my thoughts have been a heads up. An enjoy these last two weeks, they're your last with him warning. But I haven't done anything different. I hug him a little harder I guess, but really that's about it. What else can I do? Keep him from leaving the house? I've considered it, but it could happen here too. He could be sleeping in while I'm at work and a fire could be blazing around him, trapping him in our bedroom. A coyote could walk in and beat him up, while our puppy, Penny cries in the corner. A robber could break in and steal our computer and then shoot him! He could get eaten by a bear.

See? Morbid, unprovoked thoughts. I am sick, sick, SICK.

While I am on break at work yesterday. I text him, “Love you!” But it isn't to say that I love him. It is really to say. Text me that you love me back so I know you are alive.

He doesn't message me back. So for the last three hours of my shift, whenever the store phone rings (twice every minute), I wait for someone to announce, Good afternoon team members, Rachel in Customer Service, your husband is on Line Two, he's dying.

This call doesn't happen.

I think this all started a couple of weeks ago when I asked him about the psychic he once saw. He had always told me that she said he would be a lawyer when he grew up. So I always took this to mean that he would be alive to grow up.

“She was just some lady hired for a bar mitzvah. She just read my palm.” He said.

And that was that. My backbone broke. All this time I thought he had seen a real psychic who would have warned him of a young death. Showed him the flipped Death Card. But no, she was just some weird lady hired for a twelve-year old's party.

I need to take myself and my imagination on a vacation with Scott so that I may follow him around and sooth my mental madness.