Secret

'You've abandoned me
Love don't live here anymore
Just a vacancy
Love don't live here anymore.'

City and Colour on the radio. The taste of bile, Scope and Colgate in my mouth. The wafting smell of bacon in a cast iron pan. The fat cat from next door scratching the balcony railing to shit. My stomach tossing back and forth like an abandoned ship at sea.

From behind me the phone rings, startling me from my thoughts. My fingers curl tighter around the fork I’m using to turn the bacon, my stomach wrenching with sickness and panic. I let it ring to the answering machine, listening to the doleful beep before the masculine voice starts to talk. I know who it is and I have absolutely no desire to speak with him. My head and my heart cannot be put in the situation he’d inevitably put me in. They’d conflict, and I’d be put in a worse situation than I already am now.

His message ends, and I’m back to daydreaming. The crackling of grease in the pan. My tongue growing dry and fuzzy as a sock. My eyes watering like morning rain, my palms shaking like I’m eighty, not twenty three. My blood sizzling in my veins.

The phone rings again. It tears through my imaginary silence like a knife through skin, disembowelling the collective thoughts I have managed to gather. I turn off the stove, my hands still shaking, and walk towards the answering machine.

It beeps again. There is a moment of silence which is followed by a short, exasperated exhale.

“Trina, I know you’re there. It’s a Sunday,” he says, as if that will magically make me want to pick up the phone.

I wait for a few more seconds, my hand burying themselves in my pockets at their own accord. His breathing is heavy and loud, and for a moment I can picture his face. Pain and anguish rips through me, and my heart seizes with the unwanted feelings.

“Please, you’re my best friend. I need you right now. Michelle gave birth to a boy. I know I left things in a bad way last time we saw each other, but I need you on the happiest day of my life and-.”

I can’t hear any more of this fucking shit. With a cry so loud it seems to freeze everything around me, I pull the answering machine from the wall, not caring as it rips out some of the plaster. Fuck it. Fuck everything. It’s nothing, and I am nothing. I am fading into the background slowly and surely, day by day. I let Brian get in and when that happens, shit hits the proverbial fan and I’m left scrambling to try and clean up the mess. Well fuck him. Not today, not now, not ever.

He can take his tramp slut of a wife and shove it up his ego centric asshole for all I care. He knocked her up on purpose, and now he’s going to live the life he’s always dreamed about. But what about me? Didn’t I matter to him at all? Of course not, the answer was that simple.

I was a side fuck, and I let it happen because he was my best friend. My very best friend who I pined over and ached over for as long as I can remember. He used to be a part of my life, but now he is nothing.

My hand touches the small belly that’s protruding from my loose shirt. I can’t let him see me like this, reinforce that feeling he got that he made a mistake. He can be happy with Michelle and his new baby boy, but he will never see me again. Not me or the twin baby girls growing inside of me. As much as I love him, that’s over now. I have to look out for myself and my daughters, who need me now more than ever.

'Love don't live here anymore
Just emptiness and memories
Of what we had before
But you went away
Found another place to stay, another home.'