Excerpt: The Distancing Effect of September

Here is my creation myth story: In the beginning, there was a girl who was all alone. She liked being alone. She got to wander wherever she wanted to and no one asked her to pick up their dry cleaning or expected her to make their meals or clean up in the kitchen afterward. Occasionally she would have a thought or a funny joke she wanted to share, but there was no one to tell it to. Instead, she would just say the funny line out loud to herself. If the thought was very important, she might write it down. Sometimes she had important thoughts but wasn’t near a paper and pen and so didn’t write it down and it was lost forever – unless it was so important that she thought it again later.
Even though the girl liked being alone most of the time, there were times when she was a little lonely. She thought about getting a pet. She couldn’t get a cat because she was allergic, plus she didn’t like that cats were able to jump up on counters and tables; it seemed unsanitary. Not to mention that fact that house cats pooped in the house in a litter box and a person had to come behind them and scoop out the poop and throw it away. That seemed like too much effort and just too gross to her. She didn’t want fish because they required work to keep them alive but there was no reciprocal attention – they were not cuddly and could not be hugged. She felt the sam about the reptile class of pets, too. She thought birds were the worst combination of noisy, messy and uncuddly possible in a pet.
She felt her only real possibility for an affectionate pet was a dog, but she seemed to recall dreams of a previous life with dogs where there was a lot of getting up early and sometimes going out in the rain because the dogs had to be taken on walks or let out into the yard. Sometimes the dogs couldn’t wait and there were messes in the house. And things got chewed up and dog hair got everywhere and lots of fabric-covered things always smelled vaguely of dog. The dream ended with the last awful visit to the vet where an old dog arrived with her, riding the whole way on her lap, helping her to drive, knowing she loved it, but never getting to come home with her again. No, she didn’t think she could stand to live through that again, dream or not.
She considered getting a mate. Someone she could talk to and laugh with and watch movies with and make love with, maybe even create offspring with and populate the whole world with herself as the Mother Goddess. She herself did not believe in deities, but if the later generations wanted to create fantasy stories to populate their history with, that was up to them. Again, she remembered the dream where she’d had a mate and children, but it had ended badly with tears and bankruptcy.
The girl decided that being alone was kind of pain sometimes, but mostly it was okay. So she stayed alone forever, never mated, never created children and when she died the world died with her.