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2:37 A.M.
"What we've got here is a failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week. Which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it." Strother Martin's voice penetrated through the silence in the empty room, gruff and solid and sure. Will flipped the channel without a second thought.
The silence may have made things worse, though; the male now left alone with his too-loud thoughts and his too-bright lights. The click-click-click of heels walking out still echoed in his mind, the sound of slamming doors following close behind. There was nothing he could've done, he explained to the now-empty apartment, to the cold instant ramen beside him, to his fifth cigarette. Nothing he could've done.
She had left out of nowhere, just like how she had come, all whirlwinds and heavy metal and quiet strength. She opened his door just as quickly the last time as she had the first, albeit much quieter because of the baby cradled in her arms. He needs a father , she had said. Someone to be there for him. Someone to look up to. Will pulled the clothes back out of her bag, back onto their shared bed, a bed he hadn’t slept on in months. Looked at the baby’s clothes, so small, so vulnerable. Tried to convince her that he could change. Tried to convince himself. She left ten minutes later.
Will took another swig from a new beer and a quick drag from his cigarette before wolfing down the remnants of his long-cold noodles. There had to be some way to make this right again. The ramen was eventually exchanged in Will’s hands for his phone, in a last-ditch effort to say something that could somehow change her mind. He dialed her number. Waited. Dialed again. Nothing. Threw his phone to the other side of the couch. Leaned his head against the back of it so he didn’t have to look at it anymore.
The apartment was eerily quiet in this state, the occasional drip-drip-drip of rain outside making its way to his ears, but nothing else. He tried to turn his thoughts away from the sound of Heather’s heels on the floor of their run-down apartment, steadily walking away. Drip-drip-drip. Click-click-click. Soon enough, there was another bottle gone, another cigarette smashed into the table in front of the couch. Oh well.
They were both young once, more hopeful, more naïve. In love, they thought, with a 9-to-5 hanging over Will’s head like the pianos in the cartoons he still watched occasionally in the mornings. With dreams of a child dancing in Heather’s mind for more time than he would have liked to admit.
It was their beginning that had mattered, wasn't it? The dream of normalcy, the white-picket-fence life they almost had. In between a few swigs of water, to lessen the hangover later, Will realized lives like those weren't meant for people like him, buzzed in the dark at two A.M., flipping through the same shows he watched before she had left, in the same place he would have been normally. It was almost like nothing had changed. But so much had. So much.
7:58 A.M.
Will had a headache. The kind that spreads in an uncomfortable layer of pain over your skull, sinks into your thoughts and makes the lights almost blinding. He felt his heartbeat in his brain, through every molecule of his body, but that was alright. Because he was coping. In dark blue slippers and a barely presentable tee. He was coping.
But coping doesn't make the headache go away, so he stumbled through the aisles of a Walmart, the squeak of his cart doing nothing to relieve the tension in between his shoulders. With two family-sized bags of chips already in his cart, Will decides that the six-pack of beer is just more cost-effective. In it goes.
After all, he was coping. Will was coping, and part of coping was saving money. He made his way to the express checkout line, despite the clear lack of customers in the store to begin with. It seemed like, along with beating the slowly-rising sun, he also beat the peppy soccer moms and the men getting ready for late summer barbeques. The woman behind the register looked him up and down.
“Hey, how’re you doing today? You look beat.” This was said as conversationally as possible while putting a bottle of extra-strength Advil in a tan plastic bag alongside two bags of chips and a six pack.
“Fine, just tired.” He replied, simply, and it was nothing close to the truth. And he tried to smile. And she tried to smile.
He scurried home not soon after, sunlight streaming through cracks in the blinds by now. Tossed the crumpled receipt to the floor, since there was no real need to clean up now, at least nothing urgent. Made note to get better blinds. You've done all you had to , Heather's voice spat at him from the worn armchair next to the couch, from the place she had spent many a sleepless night. You couldn't handle it, anyways , her voice sounded from the lamp, the light suddenly too bright.
Will settled down, nursed a lukewarm beer. The lamp flickered, dimming and brightening, before shutting off on its own. Some men you just can’t reach.