Tragic Case of My Reality

It was cold when I woke the next morning. Abnormally cold. Despite having been burrowed deep beneath endless layers of blankets and sheets, there was an absence in the bed that compelled any warmth I should have felt to mask its comfort with a chilling sense of vacancy. Being half asleep and beyond uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, foreboding atmosphere of the bedroom, I snuggled up close to the opposite side of the bed to where I assumed Mike had been resting as well. I expected to be greeted with the heat of his body, to be able to cure my sudden brush with discomforting chill, but the side of the bed Mike preferred held no warmth. Believing the initial lack of a body lying beside me surely must have been my imagination, naturally I wriggled myself as far to the left as I could go until my body was flirting dangerously close to falling into the open air next to the bed.

Not until I was curled up on the very edge did I accept Mike had gone AWOL.

I felt the nausea flow through me at once, terrified that my lover had once again been far too intimidated by the repercussions of our pregnancy to stick around. Maybe I’d done something wrong, said something to upset him the night before, but I couldn’t produce a valid reason other than being a flake that would cause Mike to up and leave me in the middle of the night. Apparently, every damn promise he’d whispered in the dark was yet another ruse of a chapter in his book of glorified deceptions. I was just another good fuck that happened to transform into a much larger problem. I was a fucking inconvenience.

Unable to make it to the porcelain throne before the bile forced its way out of my lips, I vomited onto the tiled floor of the bathroom. With tears falling innocently from my cheeks, adding an easily fixable mess to the more hideous disarray I’d created on those goddamn tiles, I was silently grateful that I hadn’t soiled the carpeting of the bedroom instead. Through blurred vision, I managed to clean up my mess without completely losing whatever composure I’d fooled myself into believing I actually possessed.

A muffled crash and a stifled sob from the kitchen immediately caught my attention as I dumped the last of the contaminated fragments of paper toweling into the trash, and for a moment I found myself hoping it to be Mike’s cursing I heard in the kitchen below. For a moment, I felt myself relaxing and warming up to the possibility that my boyfriend and I weren’t headed for an imminent failure of a relationship…but as I descended the stairs and made my way towards the agitated voice, I could tell at once that it wasn’t Mike. Instead, it was my elder son I found, with his knees pulled to his chest, glaring down at a particularly nasty gash on his forearm. A broom, dustpan, and an ominous pile of glass were left abandoned near his troubled form as he continued to noiselessly weep.

“You ok, Joe?” I asked timidly, approaching my son with the caution of one rounding on a bucket of nuclear waste. I feared an explosion, and with Joey, it was a more than plausible trepidation.

The boy’s head snapped in my direction, and he rapidly made to swipe the tears from his eyes to avoid the embarrassment of being caught crying. When his eyes landed upon my tearstained cheeks, however, his actions notably slowed.

“Cut myself trying to get the glass off the floor,” he muttered. “I thought I should do something to make up for my psycho outburst last night, and then the glass tries to fuckin’ maul me. Figures, right?” With a cynical, half-hearted chuckle, Joey averted his eyes and began nervously chewing his bottom lip.

“I seriously hope you don’t talk like that in front of your mother,” I retorted, the parent in me refusing to be ignored once the f-bomb had been dropped.

Joey rolled his eyes and sighed, “Obviously not. I know you’re the only one who gets away with profanity around her.”

“Damn straight,” I giggled, winking at my son as he smiled weakly up at me. He gave the floor next to him an encouraging pat, wordlessly giving me permission to join him.

While my body casually slid down the cabinets, Joey cautioned, “Careful now, Dad. There’s demonic glass down here ready to gnaw your arm off.”

“Oh, I’m well aware of that. I saw what it did to Mike’s body.” The bitterness in my voice was unleashed before I knew it had been surreptitiously dwelling in the back of my throat, and instantly, my son’s eyes darkened with the guilt I’d unintentionally inflicted upon him.

“Mike’s gone,” he informed me, eyes fixed on the floor in front of us.

“I noticed,” I replied dismally, my gaze mirroring my son’s to stare upon the same damn invisible speck on the floor.

“He didn’t say where he was going. He just…looked at me, then left. He looked so damn…tired,” Joey continued, his hand somehow worming its way into mine in an innocent attempt at consoling me.

“He didn’t say anything?” I repeated, thunderstruck.

“Nope, but his cell phone was glued to his ear, so I guess he has an excuse for being an antisocial bastard,” Joey shrugged, trying to rationalize blatantly irrational behavior. I appreciated the gesture, but I think I would have preferred if my son had been brutally honest as he was wont to be. I would have been more comfortable with Joey rambling about how he knew all along that our relationship was a horrible idea.

“Yeah, well that antisocial bastard is your little sister’s baby-daddy. He could have waited long enough to let you know where the fuck he planned to run off to,” I sighed, despite the impending dread that Mike would not return crawling repulsively about in my skin.

Joey let out a sudden, genuine laugh as he demanded, “Did you seriously just use the phrase baby-daddy?”

“Indeed, niglet,” I chuckled, amused in the way my son cringed at my uncanny ability to slaughter overused adolescent-hipster terms.

“Dad…just…no,” he asserted.

“Jesus fucking Christ, I managed to embarrass you when there’s no one even around to witness my brilliance,” I marveled, nudging Joey playfully in the ribs.

“You’re not embarrassing me,” Joey mumbled. “You’re just a hopeless dork.”

“I’m ok with that. Hell, millions worship for me for my dorkery.”

“And that’s something I’ll never understand.”

We fell victim to silence, seeing as the lighthearted path our conversation had taken was simply a route to avoid discussing the darker topics looming over our heads. I knew Joey was concerned as to why I had been crying, but he chose not to ask in light of having witnessed Mike’s rude getaway. Instead, my son decided that temporarily taking my mind off of my boyfriend’s departure was paramount to conversing about the more awkward topics regarding my pregnancy and exactly how that came about.

“Y’think he left a note?” I questioned, unable to contain my curiosity.

“I dunno…I didn’t really look for one,” Joey confessed, taking my query as his cue to help me up from off the ground. The hand that had empathetically held onto mine throughout our reality-skirting conversation peeled me off the ground almost effortlessly, and soon the pair of us was foraging through the countertops to find a note I doubted we’d ever find.

“Oh my God, Dad!” Joey cried, grasping a seemingly misplaced napkin from a counter and scurrying to my side so we could read it together.

Beej, stop worrying. I’ll be back before dark.
~ M