Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below.

Here it comes. My inevitable death, ignoring me all those years when I wished for it daily, arriving only after I've decided I want to live forever.

No praise, no blame. Just so.

I'm not a general or a colonel or a builder of cities. I'm just a corpse who wants not to be.

I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.

But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

She is Living and I'm Dead, but I'd like to believe we're both human. Call me an idealist.