She said she was going out.
She said something had come up at the studio, that it was probably nothing.
She said she would be back by nine.
The clock glares at me from its perch on the nightstand. Three digits, crimson and marring, dance against in pitch black relief of the darkened room. Every blink brings another tiny bounce, another new direction to their drunken two-step. Every so often, one of them will flicker, for the tiniest fraction of a second, before climbing, digging its heels into the obsidian rock around it before losing its footing and falling to its death.
It blinks again, then climbs. I know that somewhere, just to the clock's left, sits a bottle of Jura, half consumed in a fit of anxiety some odd lifetimes ago. Why I had not simply gone with a cheap, disposable wine in the front of the cabinet--the very wine that we bought for that exact purpose--eludes me; though, to be fair, it is not hard for the mind to slip out from the head of a pony when drunk on something other than alcohol.
She will be mad when she gets home and finds it, half empty, left to aerate and spoil in the new Spring heat. I don't know the first thing about alcohol--only that it was her favorite, and that if I downed a third of it in one foul, burning gulp, it might make me feel a little bit better. It didn't, of course, and now I am left to fend off the wretched double-punch of loneliness and drunkenness--a combination bestowed on the faint of heart only when they desire nothing more than to push it away and into the depths of unconsciousness, it seems. The alcohol has not allowed me to push it away, though. No, it has only turned a mild state of anxiety into a hellish nightmare revolving around three blinking numbers that double and melt back together of their own accord.
It is suddenly too hot. I kick off the covers. The sheet separating me from the mattress clings to my skin in the fresh, inhospitable heat. It will stay like that for the rest of the night, just as it has the last two. Unlike then, however, so many white-hot hours ago, there is not another to share the murk with. It wouldn't get any colder with a second body in under the sheets--quite the opposite, in fact--but my body would not be the one dominating my thoughts in those blessed, imagined hours.
Behind the bottle rests a photograph. I don't need the light to know what it looks like. Two freshly-minted honeymooners, blue and grey fighting a lover’s quarrel for control of the frame, offset only by a shared smile that stretched the length of the picture. Stuck, marooned on an island with nothing more than a bottle of rum and a belated hope of rescue, we took solace in each other and flipped the despair on its head in a joyous dance. We were happy then. Perhaps not content to lounge in the sand and sing songs to each other, our only audience, the wind, the stars--but happy.
There were no fights, then, no conflicts other than where to get food or who would get the bigger portion of blanket. There was no talk of mortgages or bills or split-income tax returns, the things that turn wedded bliss into a box to check and a check to write. Jobs wouldn't wait for moments of tenderness to run their lovely course, days of repetition savored the softer aspects of life only to stuff themselves, leaving what was left to spoil in the thick air of early morning.
The numbers blink again, but my eyes close before the digits are able to climb again. When I open them, it is the middle number that has leapt. I close them again experimentally, finding the same result when I open them again. The bottle has never sung a sweeter tune. I succumb to its siren's wail in an instant, reaching out blindly for the all too familiar neck of glass protruding from the nothingness above the numbers.
But it is not there. My hoof reaches out to where I know the bottle sat only a short minute ago. The numbers can’t lie--it was only there a moment ago. How long had it been since I had taken my last draw? I try to look at the numbers, but my hoof blots them out. If I can just get a quick glance, I can reorient myself and find that darned bottle that seems to have sprouted legs and walked into obscurity without my noticing--
Something warm brushes against my hoof. For a perilous moment, the room is silent, as a ship adrift on the open ocean is before it falls from the edge of the earth into space. I can finally see the numbers now. It’s been...
Three numbers blink back at me.
The bottle, rocked by my own ignorance, topples from the shelf, striking the nightstand with a single reverberating toll of bells before coming to rest against the carpet below. A sound, reminiscent of water pouring from a sink, fills my ears. My jura--my precious medium, my last hope of sleep in this foul soup of nighttime air--soaks itself into the carpet.
Breathing does me no good--the hot air only chokes me. The sole drink to ease me out of my abysmal state makes my floor drunk until it blushes amber.
She will be furious, of course. First I go and open up her drink--her favorite drink--and now I put it to such spectacular waste as this. When she gets home...
If she gets home...
My slurred tongue can not do justice the anxiety that swelled inside me, the sweet melody of hope that the bottle sang. Even now, it still sounds as distant as it did when its first chorus met me.
I hear laughing, the nostalgia echo of a fire long since burst from its hearth and consumed the heart of she who kindled it. Then it is silent, and the heat swallows me alive.
Author's Note
For the JFF.
