Phillip had the nasty habit of absentmindedly retrieving earwax from his left ear with his little finger and wiping it on the side of his favourite armchair which was now smooth and no longer porous as he had been doing this for years. The side of the armchair was now shiny and mottled like some sort of caramel freak batik. 

He had never recovered from responding to a particular emergency call that had shaken him to the point of catatonia and necessitating his early retirement. As an EMT, Phillip had had his share of emotional and visceral experiences: births and deaths and everything in between. 

The call that tipped him over the edge was from someone in an apartment complex in a neighbourhood that had gone to seed. Buildings that used to be respectable and well maintained had suffered from decades of neglect. There was a stagnant pall in this forgotten neighbourhood.

The caller had not seen his neighbours in the apartment next door in a while and was suspicious because if they were travelling they would have asked him to keep an eye on the place and gather the mail and the inevitable flyers that crowd out the minuscule mailboxes in the lobby. 

When Phillip and his team arrived, they tried knocking on the door to no avail. They got the concierge to open the door with his master key but the door was also chained which didn’t stop the intense putrid smell from being released through the aperture. A bit of shoulder made short work of the chain and Phillip entered the apartment with his sleeve covering his nose. The blinds were closed and In the dusty murk he saw two decomposing bodies locked in an embrace like a distorted Romeo and Juliet in the middle of the floor. The only life left in the fetid air were the swarms of flies and maggots consuming the deceased. 

The coroner eventually ascertained that the man had had a heart attack and died a week previously and the woman had lain next to him for three days and had actually successfully willed her own death from natural causes, mostly dehydration and grief. 

Phillip, although a seasoned and somewhat hardened veteran of Emergency services became disoriented and dizzy upon experiencing this tragic scene. He stumbled to the outer hallway and collapsed in a heap. Another ambulance needed to be dispatched to the scene to deal with this new development.

Something like this can simply not be unseen, unsmelled, unfelt. The horror was etched permanently in Phillip’s brain. His ruminating and constantly reliving the scene consumed his waking hours and sent him entirely off the rails unable to function beyond the bare minimum. Obviously he was going to need therapy to return him to who he was before this incident.

Every time he seemed to be making a slight recovery he would be thrust back into his disturbing overriding thoughts of that final embrace. Was it love? Was it a sick codependency? Is it even possible to will one’s own death? Is the loss of will to live powerful enough to do that? All of the deaths he’d ever faced:  his parents, his sister, his beloved pets and the numerous victims of car crashes he’d ever seen raced in and out of focus through his restless mind dislodged from time and any sense of reality. 

He was tempted to undo his twelve years of sobriety just to anesthetize his brain. Tempted, but unable to act on it.  He asked Siri to play Willie Nelson on his HomePod which was a welcome distraction until the song came on that had Willie singing “it’s not something you get over, it’s something you get through” 

This awoke something in Phillip that he hadn’t felt in ages. He got up and poured himself a glass of water and drank it all in one long and cleansing swoop. He asked Siri to stop the music and went back to the living room and decided then and there to throw out his favourite chair which had come to represent a sort of prison to him and may have stalled his ability to get through this nightmare.

The chair sat on the curb for over a week as he had just missed the bi-weekly heavy items pickup. He didn’t care if anybody else took it, but even the most ragged of the trash pickers were not interested. Just as well, he thought as the robot arm swung the chair into the back of the garbage truck and the hydraulic scoop descended and crushed the chair never to be sat on again.

He received his new chair the same day he picked up a kitten at the SPCA. It was a motorized easy chair that moved like a dentist’s chair. The kitten eventually grew weary of the box the chair came in and crawled up Phillip’s leg and settled purring in his lap. He decided to name the kitty “Willie” and Phillip closed his eyes and slept peacefully for the first time in years.