What's Wrong?

He raised his head from the table and groggily looked around the room. What time was it? The ever-helpful clock on the wall said it was almost 2am. That didn't seem right, but he trusted the clock better than his own judgment at the moment. He saw on the table beer cans...everywhere. He wasn't sure how many were there. He didn't want to count. However many it was, it wasn't enough to make him feel better or to help him forget. He rested his head in his hands. His head hurt. He raised his head again after a few minutes, pushing his disheveled hair out of his face. It fell right back in to his eyes. He reached for the phone and scrolled to her name in his contact list. It wasn't there. Damn it. He had deleted her number in a moment of finality a few hours before. He'd known it for years, but his mind was a little too fuzzy to come up with the right digits.



He wanted to tell her everything floating around in his head. He wanted to scream about how much she had broken him and how much he hurt. He wanted her to beg for him back just so he could laugh at her and feel just a tiny bit of control. He knew part of it was the beer talking. His bravado, exaggerated. He dropped the phone back on the table and stood up. A little uneasy. He kept his head down and hands firmly on the table until the room stopped spinning. He began tossing cans toward the trash can. His aim felt right enough, but he heard the cans hitting the ground. Too tired to pick them up, too dejected to care, he trudged toward the living room, scooping up his phone on the way.

He threw himself across the couch haphazardly. He wanted to talk to someone. Needed to get some of this out of his mind and into the universe. He glanced at his contact list again and suddenly knows who to dial. She wouldn't mind his drunken call at this hour. Not once she realized just how bad he was. She didn't need to know that she wasn't his first choice of numbers to dial. Honestly, she probably expected it. She had been the one to convince him to delete the number earlier. He held the phone between his cheek and shoulder, wondering if he would wake her up. Just as he was ready to hang up and accept that he'd be completely alone for the rest of the night, he heard her. She knew him well, he realized, when she answered the phone with an urgent "What's wrong?".

8:14am 10.1.10
7:06pm 10.2.10