A house. That’s what I live in now. I used to have a home. A beautiful two story home with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a patio that I made myself. My wife and I loved entertaining on the patio, and the parties we had were nothing short of spectacular. Friends, family, neighbors, rib-eyes on the the grill, and a cooler full of beer could turn any bad day into a good one. Laughing and talking until the sun went down was what we lived for.
God how I miss my family. The deep black billows of smoke still haunt my dreams every time I try to sleep, and the sleep I used to enjoy so much is now a necessary evil. I feel that I will never will get the visions of my house burning down out of my head, knowing that I had just laid my family to rest in it. I guess I brought it upon myself though. I couldn’t stop watching. I just stood there watching the flames dance all about. And when I got tired of standing, I sat there until the last ember had flickered out.
I need to sleep tonight. I have to sleep tonight. I found a few allergy pills the last time we went out salvaging, and they are the kind that could make an insomniac snore. I was going to save them for trading to another man in this house who seems to have stashed every pack of cigarettes in this county, but I can’t. I need to take them tonight. I have to take them tonight.
The men in this house and I have a very important job to do. We’re looking for a different place to stay and hope to find one that is well stocked with supplies to sustain us for a few more weeks. We are running out of salvage locations in the close proximity, so we plan on moving on out about 25 miles closer to the city. The suburbs. That’s where we want to go . Plenty of houses there, and houses mean food, I hope. What I wouldn’t do for one of those grilled rib-eyes.
There will be more madmen there, and we have to avoid them at all costs. We can hear gunfire in the distance every day and night, but the amount is waning, so hopefully, hopefully, they have moved on in search of more people to slaughter, or they have been continually killing each other. Either way, the less of them there are, the better our chances of survival will be.
I’m glad I found this composition book the last time we were out. It’s one of the black and white ones with the words “Composition Book”, and a place to write your name, on the front. I haven’t wrote my name on it yet. I should do that in case I don’t make it. Maybe someday someone will find it and want to know who it was that lived this way. Who wrote these words? Who was this person? What was his name? Without a name, they are just words on pages….but with a name, reading these words will give you a little more insight to who I was.
I wont be writing in here anymore until after we make it to the suburbs (if we make it to the suburbs) and settle in for a few days. It’s too risky to get lost in what I am writing and lose focus of the task at hand, and the task at hand right now is to sleep. We are leaving at dawn.
My name is Desmond. Desmond Stolt.