I traveled through the gates, with one thing on my mind.
After a few turns, left, straight, right, straight again, and another left I arrived at my destination.
How long had it been? About one year exactly. How time flies.
The anniversary of when she was found is today.
A phone booth. Not sure how she found a phone booth on the streets these days, but Stella always had a way of running into the unexpected. People in the nearby apartment complex said they heard a gunshot that night, and yet there were no holes in the glass of the booth. All that was in the booth was Stella in a fetal position, clutching the phone. She had just, died there. No signs of struggle or anything. She had just locked herself in the booth and was found dead in the morning.
The news was broken to me over text.
Next thing I knew, my cubicles computer screen was broken, blood and glass shards running down my arm. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. We both agreed that we would spend the rest of our lives together, isn’t that the whole point of a proposal?
I hid away.
Laid off from my job because I wasn’t actually leaving my apartment.
I didn’t attend the funeral. What a selfish prick I am.
Seeing her in the coffin would’ve been too much to bear. I never showed my emotions to those around me as much as I could, and I knew if I were to go there, so soon, I’d never leave.
The rest of the year played out in black and white, all the color was devoid of my life. Friends were concerned for the first month, if that. Eventually they gave up on trying to help me. I don’t blame them. I was a prisoner trapped in a self imposed prison of my apartment. A prisoner who didn’t want to leave.
That was the first six months after she was found dead. I still say she was murdered, but it seems impossible to find any support for that. No bullet holes, no blood, no fingerprints, nothing but her and the phone.
Life looked up for a little while, but I kept getting pulled back to my apartment. The more time I spent outside of it, the more I felt anxious, a rope pulling me back. The rope pulling me back to the comfort of the familiar, or what was left of it. A comfortable bed, and fan. A familiar ceiling was the most comfortable part of being back home.
I slowly got better. I broke out of my shell more and more. I realized that this was no way to live life: alone. I guess that is what the point of a proposal really is, a temporary fix from loneliness.
This leads to today. I decided to visit her, to go to the funeral I never went to.
I sat down at the base of her gravestone and placed my flowers.

After a while of sitting down, I felt it. A slight bend upwards of the ground below me. That is when the knocking started. Like thousands of people were knocking on a front door, wanting to be let in as soon as possible. My ear was pressed to the ground, hoping to pinpoint exactly where the knocking was coming from. It was everywhere, all around the ground below me, from all directions. While my ear was pressed to the ground I heard a faint whisper, raspy, and horrified.
“Help me. Please. It’s so dark. Please. Help.”
The dead had risen, yet condemned to a second death in their coffins.