The aisles are long and narrow, and it hard for me to squeeze through them; I am left weaving in and out between other customers.  Right, left, right again; my feet easily remember one of the numerous paths of my childhood.  Left again, then another left, while a lady shopping for paper towels nearly runs my foot over with her shopping cart.  She doesn't even seem to notice.

I pass the clothing, so I'm getting closer.  I'm on one of those highways that runs through the middle of a large store; a really huge aisle, laced with customers hurrying or stopping to look at the displays of socks and paper towels and adult coloring books stacked in the middle of the highway.  Instead of turning right with the highway, I keep walking straight, right into the outdoor/sports supplies.  I make a zig-zag through the labyrinthine aisles of the entire sporting goods section of the store (a good portion), but I don't find what I'm looking for.  At least, not one to my liking.

So I turn out of the sporting supplies section and back onto the highway, just as crowded as ever but with new spectators, entranced at the amazingly low crew-cut socks prices compared to the swoon-worthy prices of ladies' knee-highs.  I like how none of them give me a second glance; I love how their eyes just bounce off me like I'm something that blends in perfectly with the daily functions of life.  Camouflaged but not really, that's how I am.

I make a few turns and walk into a new section.  Mannequins of children are everywhere, wearing cliche outfits to their perpetual first day of dummy school, with backpacks containing pencils and markers and pens and paper and notebooks and rulers and anything else that is a necessary or even an unnecessary school supply.  There is an entire aisle dedicated to backpacks, ranging from kittens and princesses to camouflage and violent video game heroes.  I had hoped for something plain--not black, instead maybe an unassuming khaki color, but my choices are limited.  I don't feel like driving to a completely different store just to get the perfect-looking backpack.

I pay for the navy blue backpack at the checkout counter.  The checkout lady is listening to music on her earbuds, and has several piercings in each ear that are complemented by a bright red mohawk and red eyelashes.  I used to care about makeup, but I haven't cared in eight months, two weeks, and three days: March eighth.

"Have a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow," the checkout lady drawls in feaux excitement.  I nod in response and exit the store with my backpack in a cheap plastic bag.

The backpack sits in the passenger seat of my car.  Before I start the car, I take a long look at it, and, right before my eyes, it seems to become a person, living and breathing, sitting next to me in the car.  A black figure, merely the shape of a human, that slowly assumes features: black hair, brown eyes.  Perfectly straight nose, and cheeks that dimple with a smile.  Tanned forehead, and then stubble along jawbone.  Slight moustache.  Six feet two inches tall, lanky like a basketball player with a fit body and legs muscled like a runner's.

I wouldn't worry about the hallucinations if they were, well, hallucinations, but they're not.  These hallucinations are always things that actually happened, like flashbacks and memories, that suck me back in time.  My doctor said that these are caused by the drugs she prescribed for me after I was diagnosed and had my breakdown.  What my doctor doesn't know is that I haven't taken the drugs in two weeks.  I've just thrown them into the garbage can, one-by-one, every day.

When my hallucination leans over to kiss me and whisper that everything will turn out okay, I realize over again for the umpteenth time how wittily ironic my life is.  Turns out that most things were already okay, until he got run over and he drew his last breath and the box of the pieces in my life got turned completely upside down.  I had told him that he didn't need to get me flowers, because it was raining cats and dogs outside and he knew how hard it is for people to see while they're driving in the rain.  He didn't listen to me.  His chances were somewhere around one in a thousand, the doctor said.  But what does he know?  He didn't major in statistics; his job was supposed to be saving him.  But the doctor told me that he can't resurrect the dead, and he was already gone when the paramedics got there.  Bologna, I said, but the doctor just shook his head and sighed.  One in a thousand.  I punched a hole through the doctor's office's window and left.

My knuckles turn white what with the amount of force I'm putting into gripping the steering wheel.  She yells at me that he never really loved me, that he was just acting to see how long he could convince me.  The he really loved her all along.  I stood here and took it, because at the time, I hadn't lost him yet.  I couldn't doubt until I lost him, because it is exclusively for hard-headed people to doubt something when, at any given time, you can ask the person about it and get the answer you want. But I never got to ask him.  I asked my mother about it later; she only shook her head sadly.

I haven't talked to my mother since my breakdown, actually.  Or since my diagnosis, which came first.  First my diagnosis, which he never got to hear, then my breakdown.  The doctors gave me an entire logic crash course and taught me all about cause and effect.  Because of water and evaporation, we have rain. Because of rain we get wet.  Also because of showers, we get wet.  Because of Hershey, we have milk chocolate.  Because I was diagnosed, I had my mental breakdown.  But I argue that the breakdown was ready to happen the entire time, searching for something to set it off.  His death set it off, and that was my delayed reaction.  My mother told the doctor to sedate me.  The doctor told me to stop trying to be witty.  I told my doctor to take a long walk off of a short pier.  Then my psychologist told me that he was prescribing me some medication.  I said fine, I just wasn't going to take it.  Everyone else told me oh yes I was.

The backpack is packed and ready to go on Thanksgiving morning.  Another ironic point: I met him on a Thanksgiving.  Not last year, but some year before that. 

I decide to walk, because I would be foolhardy to try to drive or even take a cab.  Besides, the parade passes by only a couple blocks away from my apartment building.  I'm glad I got the backpack that looks like something a young woman my age would carry without arousing suspicion.

The parade is halfway over when I get there--I've never been one of those people who believes in being early and super-duper prepared for everything; I come when I feel like it, however I feel like it.

Excited children sit on the shoulders of their fathers, pointing with cotton candy-sticky fingers at each new float that comes past in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Everyone is crowded in close, craning necks to get glimpses at the marching bands.  Everyone is laughing, having lots of fun without a care in the world.  These are all people who have never even heard my name before, much less met me, and have no idea at all of my pain.  Ironic that I will know of theirs.

Even though I am not usually prepared, I have it all set up.  I did it last night when I got home from the store after a busy day of bussing tables at the cafe near my apartment building. 

I carefully take the backpack from my back and unzip the large pocket.  Last night, I went dumpster diving to recover some of my discarded pills.  I didn’t take them, though; I placed them in the center of the street while I was preparing.  They are certainly ground to dust by now, but anything can be destroyed more than it already has been.  Pills, memories, emotions, mental states of being.

Irony: while everything is being blown sky-high, I remain the only sane one.    Irony: I shook the earth like he shook my world. Any one of those people could have been the one who ran him over.  That's why they all have to pay.

Sky looks so pretty framed with ash from the explosion.  The little circle of metal in my hand is no longer needed.  I set it on the ground and stomp on it.