Severed Feelings

“John?” I call out.

There’s no answer and by the closed curtains and the scarily silent apartment I can only assume that I won’t get one.

With a sigh, I set my keys on the nearest table and fling back the curtains. John’s not here and he probably hasn’t been for a while.

Sunlight pours in, filling the dark living room and blinding me momentarily before I can see the worn blue sofa and the cigarette tray filled with long finished cigarettes. I sigh, disgusted with John for smoking inside and feel a strange wave of anger wash over me. Ruffling my hair, I stare blankly up the ceiling for a second before walking toward the kitchen.

I expect a note clipped to the fridge explaining where he’s been and where he’s at, but all that’s there is a picture of the two of us making silly faces hanging from a letter “L” magnet. I’m using my hair to make a fake and unrealistic mustache in the photo, and John actually has a mustache – a phase of his that I’d despised but couldn’t sway him out of. His tongue is hanging out of the corner of his mouth and I’m crossing my eyes with my head tilted toward him.

It’s the only happy looking thing in the kitchen. Clipped beside it is a grocery list filled with stuff we need to pick up. I’m running dangerously low on conditioner and I know for a fact that John is probably out of shaving cream.

Everything else is metal and hard rock. It feels claustrophobic.

I touch the plastic-like surface of the picture with my fingertips before moving on down the hallway, checking to see if he’s actually here and just sleeping or something.

All the doors are shut as I pass them except for one. It’s Imilee’s previous bedroom from when she lived with us. John never goes inside, and hasn’t since we sent off her last box of things. He was – and still is – too mad to want to even acknowledge the room.

And, as I expected, he’s not inside. Only brightly colored and mismatched clothes hangers remain hanging in the closet – the only remnant that Imilee once stayed and breathed and slept in the room before she was just gone.

I close the door behind me as I check the other rooms.

John’s not anywhere to be found.

With a sigh, I glance at the alarm clock standing on my nightstand.

I’m home a few hours early from work and I don’t know what to do with myself. I know I need to call Joselyn back, but I don’t want to deal with it just yet. I could clean, but I know that it’s useless as of late.

My boss sent me home early after walking past my cubicle and seeing me staring blankly out the glass wall again, into the next building where people are always frantically running around all day, every day – as if they’re losing millions of dollars every second and everyone realizes that they could lose their job in the blink of an eye.

Which is probably true.

“Just take the rest of the day off, Savannah,” he said, with a sort of sadness in his dark brown eyes.

Tom Delower is a good guy despite his success. He always tries to look out for his employees, always tries to be helpful wherever he can be.

So I did – not that I really had much of a choice with him staring down at me until I agreed.

I was preoccupied by all the things that needed to be accomplished at home when I was at work, but now that I was actually home, the will to actually do anything was absent.

Sighing to myself, I crawl into bed and curl up in the safety of my sheets.

Bed – my bed – had become my haven. Nothing bad ever happened when I was there, no one could hurt me and say vile things. No one could just disappear from my life without a notice. My bed was the only place I could be completely myself, completely relaxed.

Time drags on.

I watch as the luminescent numbers of my alarm clock flick, from one to two, two to three, three to four. It isn’t until the numbers have switched to 11:53 that I hear the door open with its distinctive thud against the wall.

John is home.

I don’t move.

From the living room I hear a crash. Something breaks – something made out of glass.

He’s angry again, caught in this never ending cycle.

I flinch as he swears and something else breaks. Metal hits the wall and then silence consumes the apartment again.

I imagine him standing in the middle of the living room, hair wild, eyes bloodshot, chest heaving and fists clenched. He’s taking a few seconds to try to get a grip.

And then, after what feels like an eternity, he stumbles into our bedroom. I’m lying on my side, away from him, as he crawls beside me and turns his back.

He smells like Jack Daniels and cigarettes.

Tears silently flow from the corners of my eyes and run down the curve of my nose.

This is what we have become.

In the morning, I’ll wake up and clean up his latest destruction and head off to work to stare out glass all day and he’ll get up to nurse a hangover before going to his friend Garrett’s house to attempt to be productive in his music.

And then it will repeat again and again and again until we break the cycle by admitting our love to each other before we fall back into it.