Sometimes I wake up earlier than I have to, when the rest of the world is still asleep, and pretend I'm the only person left on Earth.
That would be okay, to be the only person left on Earth, because then there would be nobody left to leave you. When I wake up, I get out of bed as quietly as I can and I sit outside. We live twenty-nine floors above the ground, and from our balcony, you can see the rest of the city from the top down. During the day, the streets are filled with people, with the children of people just like us rumbling around on Big Wheels, while their mothers drink coffee laced with Irish cream and their fathers bustle importantly to jobs that mean nothing to them except a pay check, but during the night, a sparkly hush falls, hopeful and not quite inviting, like the pathetic blanket my seven-year-old sister denies having shoved under her pillow, and everything falls quiet enough that I can pretend not to need anyone, that there's no one left to need, even though morning will fall with disappointing, level-headed certainty as lights and televisions flick on and children rise, sleepy and grumbling to be handed lunches and sent on their way, while parents drink coffee from wide, chipped mugs and agonize over the trappings of life on a dead-end street in Philadelphia and I disappear into the realm of pretended normalcy, of cleaning and working and going to school, of urging my mother out of bed, all with the tired expertise of a woman changing her hundredth diaper. I don't need anyone, I realize, but everyone needs me. Without me, life would cease to happen, at least in this one-bedroom apartment twenty-nine floors above a dead-end street in Philadelphia. Bills would not be paid, groceries would not be bought, school would be forgotten. I don't need anyone, but everyone needs me.
Sometimes I wake up earlier than I have to, when the rest of the world is still asleep, and pretend I have a reason to feel so empty.