days after

It felt like he could see me.

I had been wandering around this fairly empty town for weeks on end wondering what I was going to, where I was going to go next. I had taken up refuge in an old broke down Volkswagon that must have belonged to a family because there was still an old baby car seat in the back. I slept in the days and made rounds by night, collecting anything I may need. Avoiding almost everyone that was left.

This is until, I felt like he could see me. No one looked at each other anymore. No one spoke very much. It was almost as if some of us had forgot there were tongues in our dry mouths, forgot there were words in our fraying minds. He stood on the sidewalk partly behind a fallen oak tree and watched me while I slept in the afternoon heat, sweat collecting on my forehead and upper lip, running down my neck and between my breasts. When I woke up I could feel him. I could feel his stare cutting through the dirty glass windows and for just the quickest of split seconds I felt something. Then, he was gone. I have been looking for him now for three days, five hours and twenty seven minutes but I have come to believe or possibly fear that whomever he was and whomever he was traveling with have now long since moved onto another town. Some other town no doubt full of hungry wanderers and a small collection do-gooders trying to salvage the wreckage of what we used to call life.

I have heard that some thirty miles south there is a group of girls, girls like me, banning together. Girls with no one left. Girls who carried their dead loved ones on their backs through broke down cities and up abandoned highways searching for one last peaceful place to burry them. Girls that used to be called pretty and now feel like nothing but prey, banning together to protect each other. It’s strange the things that now tie us together. What makes one belong. I’ve thought about going out to find them. I haven’t collected enough yet. And a part of me keeps thinking he might come back.