Mutually Numb

When I woke up, I was curled into a ball on the far right side of my bed. My teeth were clenched like there were wires strung into my jaw keeping it closed, and I had the worst headache I’ve ever felt. I breathed in deeply to keep tears caused by stress and paranoia from leaking out. I looked over at my alarm and it was already 11 o’clock. I had slept in a few hours more than normal; I usually get up around 9 to wake up Aimie. I slowly pulled myself out of bed and crept around the house to see where Aimie was. I peeked in her room, everything was fine: she had already made her bed, cleaned up her toys from yesterday and propped her window open to let fresh air in. Her pink bunny print curtains were lightly moving from the small gusts of wind. I quietly made my way over to the kitchen, where I saw her digging through the fridge. Taking her arm down from the top shelf, there was a small bag of carrot sticks in her hand. She could barely reach them, but she managed to get them down without making a huge ruckus.

“Good morning!”

Aimie turned around, startled. The bag of carrots went plummeting to the ground, making a bunch of wet, crunching sounds. “Morning, Momma! I didn’t mean to wake you up, I’m so sorry.”

She was the best child anyone could ever ask for. “You didn’t wake me up, don’t worry! And besides, I should be apologizing; I slept in later than I usually do. Do you want anything for breakfast that isn’t carrots?” I lightly chuckled to myself as I picked up the now soggy, flimsy bag on the kitchen floor.

“Can I have pancakes and jelly?” It was her absolute favorite thing for breakfast.

“Of course.”

As I was getting everything ready for the pancakes, Aimie ran off to her room and grabbed her favorite doll. She was a small plush doll with long brown hair and short bangs. Her eyes were sown black buttons and she always worse the same outfit; light pink overalls with a flower pattern, a white undershirt and black Mary Jane shoes. When she was around three, Aimie dubbed the doll “Mable”. She often writes stories about her and the doll, however her name is always misspelled Mabel. I swear, that doll went everywhere with her.

“Aimie, your pancakes are almost done!”

She and Mable were sitting on the living room couch, peering out the window into the apartment complex’s hallway. “Mommy! Mommy! Somebody is here!” She said, probably seeing a person walk by the door. She wasn’t always the most reliable when it came to visitors. According to her, if somebody in the hallway is within her eyesight, they have to be coming to our door.

I guess she was right this time, though; there was a knock on the door. Taking our now fully cooked breakfast off of the stove, I ran over to answer the door before Aimie did.

“Hello?” I asked as I opened the door

Kai greeted me by tightly hugging me and smiling.

“Hey, Kai.” I smiled. “It’s a nice surprise that you stopped by!”

“Yeah, I just got your missed calls this morning. I’m so sorry that I missed them!”

Kai let himself inside, and Aoi followed behind him shortly. Aimie can running from the window and jumped up on Kai, laughing profusely. “Uncle Kai!” She yelled, with a grin that looked bigger than her that was plastered on to her face. Kai was the only other band member that Aimie gave a ‘family name’ to. All of the other members were simply on a first name basis. I guess me and Aimie aren’t that different, we both are the closest with Kai out of everybody else. I don’t know what it was about him, but he was just easy to communicate with.

Aoi and Aimie became distracted in conversation and eventually the two of them ended up eating the breakfast I made for us – I didn’t care, I was too upset to eat anyway. Seeing the opportunity, Kai brought me over to my room and we sat on my bed together.

“I didn’t want to bring this up in front of Aoi or Aimie in case it was a touchy subject, but are you okay? I never miss your calls and I feel horrible.”

I smiled lightly to myself. “Nothing that bad or tragic really happened, just a little something with Ruki. I mean it really isn’t that big of a deal -” I began to ramble off; feeling a little stupid for being worried over this now.

There was a light pause in conversation. “Well, Claire, tell me! It will make you feel better, and I can hopefully help. Ruki can be a little weird sometimes. He never really has had the best relationship with his parents, so he might not know all the cookie-cutter standards to being a dad. Give him some time, he’ll be great.” Kai was already starting to continue on a whole other tangent that wasn’t even the problem this time. I guess he’s heard me complain about that so much that he automatically assumed that’s what the problem was.

“No, no… That isn’t the problem right now.”

He raised an eyebrow to me and bit his lip nervously.

Not waiting for a response from him, I continued, “When Ruki came over to drop Aimie off yesterday, we got to sit down and actually talk for the first time in a while… and, well, he told me that he wanted to start seeing other people. Apparently, he hasn’t found anyone of interest; he just wanted to know in case he did.” I spat out the last part, I was still pretty bitter about it – more than I should have been. “It has been only me and Ruki for the past five and a half years… I don’t know if I could stand to see him with anybody else. I don’t know if I could bring it to the level that I am in love with him or that I want to be in a relationship with him - but we do have a child together and it feels too weird. You could definitely say that I care about him, I love him but am not in love with him, if you know what I mean.”

Kai nodded his head, and thought for a moment. “Do you think that you want to talk to him about it? I doubt he knows that you feel this way. He can tend to be a little…” He thought for a moment, trying to find the right word, “…dense. Unless you throw direct signals out there, he won’t catch any of them. And considering that most of your time together is spent with Aimie, I doubt that you’ve had any time to tell him this.”

I nodded, “Yeah tonight was the first night that we really got to talking in a while. I’m just afraid that he has felt this way for a while and didn’t know when to tell me. I don’t want to be in his way or make him unhappy, Kai…” Things went straight downhill after I said that. After you let your guard down and the first tear drops, then there is no going back. I inhaled and bit my lip, trying to hide the fact that I was crying. I was never good at hiding my emotions, and Kai immediately noticed. He slowly pushed me into him, and let me cry on his shoulder. He rubbed my back and kept telling me everything was going to turn out alright. I was sure things were eventually going to be okay, but I don’t want to wait – I want everything to be prefect right now.

The more I thought about it, the worse my sobbing got. And the worse my sobbing got, the stupider I felt for being worried over this. I could tell he was trying, but honestly what Kai was doing wasn’t easing my paranoia. It took a lot of force, but I eventually was able to stop crying enough to actually breathe. I looked up at Kai, and whispered a soft ‘thank you’.

He nodded his head and smiled back. “Here, I have an idea. Why don’t take Aimie out somewhere and invite Ruki to go with you? She always is happier when you two are together. Besides, I don’t think he even ran the idea past her yet – and I am almost positive that if his daughter didn’t want him to see other girls he wouldn’t, right?”

I was trying to believe what Kai said and take it positively, I really was. It isn’t like what he was saying wasn’t true; I suppose that his ideas just sounded a little too optimistic for the time being. “Well, Ruki has Aimie tomorrow. He asked if he could see her specially, because I think there is a movie or some father-daughter thing he wanted to do with her. Besides, I don’t know if I want to bring it up too soon… I don’t think any answer he could give me would suffice unless he took back what he said - and I don’t think I’d even be happy with that. I’ve never been jealous with him before, I guess because I’ve never had to. I’m just always afraid that he doesn’t like me as a person. The one night something actually did happen, we were both so drunk I don’t even think he knew where he was.”

Kai pulled me close to him again, even though I wasn’t crying this time. “Claire,” he softly said, “Whether or not Ruki gives you a satisfactory answer, whether or not he stays in your life forever, I will always be right here, I promise.” He lightly pecked the top of my forehead and wiped the remaining tears from my eyes.

Aimie and Aoi were making a huge uproar of laughter about something in the kitchen; I was sure that everyone in the apartment building could hear them. I looked up at Kai, and he smiled at me.

“Let’s go out there and see what they’re up to,” he suggested, “I know that’ll get your mind off of things.” Well, he was right about that. When Aimie and Aoi got together, things often did get a bit tiresome to keep up with.