Five Stages of Grief Dissected into Twenty-Six Parts

and now, because I can, and have been shirking my studying responsibilities, here are my 26 chapter openers for what will presumably be my NaNoWriMo 2012 attempt
(in temporal order and in matching font):

1. M. My eyes opened. My back ached. I was on a ground. My legs tingled with a peculiar sensation. It was sand, blowing against them. My mouth tasted like metal, my tongue felt foreign. My skin burned. The sun was shrouding me. I felt weak. My ears could hear the ocean and my hands could find my chest. I tried to sit up but my body wouldn't allow it. Minutes passed, maybe hours, before I tried again. And when I finally saw it, the sea stretching out before me like the great plains I realized I had never seen it before. I realized I had never seen an ocean before, either. I didn't remember any of these things, but I knew what they were, which, I realized, as my heart sped up and my hands clenched at my shirt, was more than I could say about myself.

2. Q. Quiet isolation had been closing around me for days. Maybe I was losing it. My grasp. On reality. When I looked upwards to the sky and saw nothing but myself staring back past stars, through clouds, from beyond the sun, I knew I was the only human in this entire world. What was I doing that necessitated my prolonged survival on this lonely planet? Without the context of others, time had no meaning and when the sun exploded this solar system from the inside-out, my buried and mineralized bones would be ripped to shreds, to their simplest components. "Fuck. I need to eat." Presumably the universe agreed with me.

3 C. Coming closer to the clearing, I realized all the trees were shrinking in height. I wasn't getting larger. Short stumps and reddish-tinted leaves at the apex of the young palms assured me that this area had been touched by a creator of sort sort.

4 E. Echoing around me were the calls of hundreds of tiny insects. Why they had chosen to inhabit this particular stretch of canyon was just another mystery that would never be answered.

5. V. "Vivian." I wanted to tell her that that was a beautiful name, that it belonged to a great aunt of mine. But I couldn't. Not because I couldn't remember my family history, but because I was trying to think of a new name for myself when she eventually got around to asking for it.

6.T. Two days later she was finally comfortable enough with me to fully extricate herself from the canvas cocoon she had built in one of the crevices chiseled into the sandstone cliff.

7. N. Nine. There had been ten but now there were nine. Had she taken one? Was she plotting against me?

8. H. "Heaven is reserved for heroes, don't you think?" She turned to face me and I realized how pale she had become, her skin easily highlighted from the fire pit with its burning embers sending sparks upward to blend in with the stars surrounding the new moon.

9. I. It was that noise again that woke me up, a slight minute-hand-turn counter-clockwise from the onset of the equatorial six in the morning sunrise. It was quieter this time, however, and in full consciousness I realized I may have dreamt it into my life. Light scattering from a nearby sun carved out her shape within an arm's reach of me. With shallow breaths she looked dead, but I fought the urge to poke her, nudge her awake. We had respect now, and although I found myself caring for her contentment, I had decided in the last few days that our respect and trust were valuable whereas my fear that she would spontaneously die were not worth thinking about.

10 L. "Left me for dead, didn't you?" The man sneered at Vivian. His eyes were caustic, even hidden behind oversized glasses. I felt I couldn't breathe. I turned to look at her, thinking she would also feel what I was feeling--an interesting mix of pity and fear. But, and at under a yard away from me I would have seen any faltering facial expressions, her affect had the dullness of the dead about it. She started walking past me, began reaching for him.

11 Y. Yappy, perhaps, but seemingly wiser, the non-native parrot was proving more supportive than Tom's non-native dog in my search for the island's indigenous wildlife.

12. B Bivalves I mumbled as I knelt down, getting closer to the curious holes that popped air out of themselves every time a wave receded past their locations, back into the ocean. Why hadn't I noticed these before? When the next wave came, it brushed over my feet and I lost my balance, fell to my knees, and as sea salt splashed up to my chest, and cold water tugged at my ankles, I remembered something. Not just a fact or a physical movement or how to sing or how to keep warm at night with nothing to cover yourself with. No. This was my first explicit memory:

13 D. "Drinking yourself to sleep every night sounds like fun--hell, when I was twenty-six, twenty-seven, I would have paid to do that. But it's not as… carefree as you'd think. Well, maybe you don't think alcoholism is funny. Good for you. It isn't. But it happens to the best of us and I wasn't a hero to start out with."

14 A. Apt was something Tom would never be. He talked in such a way that I questioned whether or not he thought he existed with us at all. I wanted to ask Vivian about it, but it seemed as if she was making a conscious decision to almost always be with him, and the few times I got her alone she seemed much more closed off than usual, which made her functionally mute.

15 J. "Jealousy perhaps?"

"Jealous about what? What in the world could I possibly be jealous about?"

I could hear them bickering. I had never heard them talk so loudly at each other before. I didn't move. I didn't want to scare them into silence. If they thought I was still fishing, let them think that.

16 G. "Go away." He said. I stopped moving, but I didn't do as he asked. I wanted to know what he knew, if he knew anything. I knew Vivian didn't seem to care, and maybe she was fine with this, but I needed to know more.

17X. "Xenolithic?" Vivian asked. She was holding a small piece of onyx, about the size of a child's heart, in her hand. I had been rambling about how unnatural it was that the island had volcanoes, and pumice, but also, somehow onyx. She was still staring at it though, as I bored myself and her with some facts I remembered from high school, staring at it as if it was somehow an answer to our latest series of questions.

18 F. Fire was burning towards us. "Tom?" Vivian screamed. She didn't stop, even as the question turned into a series of piercing howls that made me feel guilty, somehow, for not being able to guess that this would happen.

19. O. "Over time I just… stopped caring." She was quiet for a while. "But I've remembered every single day…" Anger was creeping into her inflection. As her voice started breaking she managed to say: "And it's been three and a half years," before descending into tearful convulsions.

20 U. Understandably as I woke up I was bewildered by the cause of my black-out. It soon became apparent as I pulled my neck to examine pain shooting through my arm. There was a dart in tricep. "Well that's not right." I glanced around for Vivian. But as my eyes deglazed themselves and my vision fully regained myself I couldn't see her anywhere.

21. R. Rising before the sun did, I was ready for answers. I couldn't sleep. I wouldn't be able to eat. I needed to find her. It was a perilous consumption. Her face, her voice, shaded every thought passing through my consciousness.

22 Z. Zealousness was something I assumed I had lost at a relatively young age. I remembered the fierce desire I had saved inside myself, half way into my teenage years. I held onto it not for a passion, not for a girl, but for a car. I was offended when my parents made me by a safer model. They said it was "too small." I remember thinking that I'd rather die in a sports car than spend the rest of my life driving a sedan. They disagreed with me. And there it went. All the passion, all the drive. There were other things that slowly killed my identity, but that was the defining moment that seemed so clear in my mind: I needed that car. That's how I felt as I climbed up the mountain: a single desire. I could very easily die. I had nothing on me, hadn't thought of bringing food, or even a blanket. But I didn't care anymore. I'd rather die finding her than living out the rest of my life waiting on a beach. Alone. Again.

23W. Wind was pulling at the grass as I walked through it; the grass scratched against my knees. The sun was setting to my left. The air would start to freeze soon. It was already cold in the highlands. But that light was too vital to my existence. If I could reach it before dying, I felt like I'd find Vivian.

24. P. Pearls, stringed pearls, yards and yards of them, were hanging from the rafters. What was this world I had just stepped into?

25. "Kings all die and we are almost dead. Does that make each of us a king? Or will we one day awake from this place with eyes like lead? In the underworld, protecting our Queen?"

26. S. Still tied up with a rope around my neck was not how I imagined my immediate future. I thought I would be dead by now. It had to have been at least a day, and I hadn't seen anyone. I laughed, it should have sounded fearful; instead it sounded like a sick and twisted opener to a horror movie. "Maybe it's been three and a half years. Maybe none of this ever happened. Maybe I am dead. Maybe this is what death is like. No. No it's not. Life can be meaningless, but mine didn't have to be. So maybe, if it makes you happy, you can kill me now. People have loved me. And I should have been grateful, but I wasn't. Because I thought they could have loved me more. But I realize now, presumably waiting to die, that people are horrible. We all are. It was my fault. It was their fault. Maybe this will be a lesson to someone. Maybe it won't be. Maybe Vivian was the only person who actually deserved my love and I failed her. Maybe I should hate myself. Maybe none of this will ever matter. But you know what? I'm fine with that. Because I know things that none of you will ever know."

"What's your name?" A voice slithered into my ear and I felt a desperate urge to rip it out. "Does it matter?"

The voice switched to my other ear, but it was falling fainter: "It matters to the people who love you." The dim room became black.

"It matters to me," I found myself saying and hearing, like my ears had suddenly been plugged and now all that existed in the entire universe were my words, my consciousness.