Love & Drugs

This was not how Olivia had pictured her life was going to turn out.

Eyes scanning over the children running around and playing on the jungle gym in front of her, she welcomed the familiar feeling of her eyes beginning to sting as they welled up with tears. She couldn’t take her eyes off the sight before her, like some sort of train wreck. Desperate to look away, but it was almost as if she got some sort of sick enjoyment out of watching her future crash and burn around her.

Maybe she just liked torturing herself.

That had to be the only explanation for why she came here every day, just to watch what she didn’t have.

Today she had brought a book with her, but it lay forgotten in her lap. She had carried it with her from her car, however she had failed to even open the front cover. She nervously fidgeted with the edge of the cover, eyes glued to a little girl and her mother digging in the sand of the park. They were building a sand castle together and Olivia couldn’t help but let her mind wander back to the dark place she so often fought against.

This wasn’t how her life was supposed to be.

She was supposed to be happy.

She was supposed to be the mom playing in the sandbox with her children, not the stranger on the bench observing from a distance. At 26, Olivia was supposed to be married with a rambunctious toddler running around. Maybe there’d be baby number two on the way too.

Instead she was unmarried and alone.

Subconsciously, Olivia began to play with the large diamond ring on her finger. Twisting it around, nervously, she tore her eyes away from the mother and daughter before her to bring her gaze down to meet the ring. The ring that was supposed to symbolize the union that had yet to occur.

She didn’t even bother to wear it most days anymore.

After four years of sporting the large diamond, it seemed dull to her. Like a weight keeping her rooted in Phoenix, anchored down in an empty relationship.

It had all gone downhill so fast.

The mother Olivia had been watching scooped up her daughter from the sand and carried her over to a man who was seated at a bench similar to the one she was currently occupying. The matching wedding bands on their fingers told everyone they were happily married, raising the curly haired toddler together in a loving and stable home.

Olivia felt dizzy with jealousy just watching the couple interact.

She longed for this life before her so badly, it made her heart physically ache. She had been so close.

They had been so close.

They had done everything right, just as everyone told them to do it. College sweethearts, engaged after 5 years together. Then there was the baby on the way.

Then the baby never made it home.

Then the wedding never happened.

Now Olivia was here.

She was watching other moms live out her dream, using this as an escape so she didn’t have to spend any more time than she already had to in her empty house. It couldn’t be healthy, but it was her way of coping. Not that sitting completely numb to the world was really a way of coping with anything.

Her tired and haggard appearance was starting to turn heads. Mothers and babysitters wary of this grown woman on the verge of tears, watching children at the playground despite not having her own child to watch over. As the first tears began to fall she picked up her purse off the ground by her feet, hastily shoving the untouched book inside of it, and took off back towards her car.

Unlocking the car, she dug through her purse to find the pack of cigarettes she always kept in there for emergencies. But the small carton was empty when she finally found it, triggering her memory of the mental note she had made last time she made this discovery to go buy a new pack. Smudged mascara now streaking freely down her cheeks in a twisted mix of makeup and salt water tears, she knew she was in no state to enter even the most run down of convenience stores. With a defeated sigh, she shoved the empty carton back into her purse and tossed it carelessly onto the passenger seat of her car.

A fitting turn of events given the day she had had so far. Now Olivia was even more on edge without a little nicotine fix to calm her nerves. A long day at the office, combined with how emotionally draining her nearly daily visit to the park was, and Olivia was now ready to curl up in her bed and go to sleep. A few hours of peace and quiet from her tormented thoughts before the sun would wake her up and she would repeat the cycle.

It was a cheap carnival ride she couldn’t figure out how to get off.

Turning the car on, she pulled out of the parking lot to begin to make her way back home. The setting sun, turning the Arizona sky a bruised combination of purple and pink hues, caught the large diamond on her finger and caused it to sparkle. She couldn’t stand to look at it anymore, slipping it off as she pulled up to a stoplight and tossing it into her purse as well. Part of her wanted to toss it out of one of the windows of her car and then pull over to the side of the road just to watch other cars run it over. Maybe that would be therapeutic.

Occasionally she was still invited to family dinners, or formal events, and those always required her to wear the ring. How would she explain that she threw it away to watch cars destroy it? Their families still believed they were happily engaged. Happily engaged couples didn’t do that.

Olivia parked in her usual spot in the driveway of their ranch-style home, next to his old white truck. She could see there were lights on inside the house from the large bay windows in the front, signalling to her that he must have been home. Grabbing her purse off of the passengers seat, she shut and locked the door of her car before making her way up the driveway to the large front door.

This was the perfect house.

Or, at least, it should have been the perfect house.

As soon as Olivia found out she was pregnant they had splurged and bought this three bedroom home in the heart of suburban Tempe. Her dad had helped remodel the entire inside of the house, bringing to life the vision Olivia had always had of her dream home. This was where she was going to raise her family, complete with a large backyard for dogs to run around in and a pool for them all to cool off in on a hot day.

Now she hated coming home to it every day.

Entering the house, she kicked off the heels she had worn to the office that day, leaving them carelessly discarded in a pile by the door. She placed her keys on the designated hook by the door, ironically hanging under one of those wooden ‘home is where the heart is’ signs. His mom had bought it as a house warming present when they first moved in. She had loved it then. Now it mocked her every day she had to look at it.

This was a house, not a home.

John was in the kitchen, eating leftover Chinese food he had found in the fridge as he stood at the counter, aimlessly flipping through a newspaper. He didn’t react to her presence as she entered the kitchen. He didn’t ask how she was or where she had been.

He never asked.

He didn’t care to find out.

Olivia grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge as well as a granola bar from a box that was sitting out on the kitchen counter. It was optimistic of her to grab it, she probably wouldn’t eat it. She still felt sick following her evening at the park. And coming home to this haunted house didn’t make her feel any better.

“We have dinner with my parents tomorrow night.” His voice was quiet as he spoke, turning another page in the paper as his eyes continued to skim over the headlines.

She didn’t care.

She would have shrugged if he had been looking at her to indicate that she had in fact heard him, but he didn’t bother to turn around. So instead she took her things and left the kitchen. She made her way across the house to the spare bedroom, a room that had once been set aside strictly for guests, but over the last year Olivia had adopted it as her own personal space. It was the closest she could get to a getaway while still being confined within the walls of this dreaded house.

Dropping her purse onto the ground, she crawled under the covers of the bed without even bothering to remove the clothes she had worn to work that day. She just needed to close her eyes and escape the reality of what her life had become, if only for a few hours.

Because this wasn’t what Olivia’s life was supposed to have become.

Even with her eyes closed, she could still feel them welling up with tears. She rolled over so she was face down, hoping the pillow her face was pressed into would muffle the sounds of her sobs as they began to slip from her mouth. Not that John would notice. Or care.

His life wasn’t supposed to have turned out like this either.