365 Days (Part 1) | ✓

138. Mailbox

138. Mailbox: Create a poem, short story, or journal entry based on a recent item of mail you've received.

Bills. Bills, bills, bills.

She tossed them to the side, as she always did. Right into the wastebin with the others. As time passed, they arrived with increased frequency. She didn't care. There was little she cared about these days.

"Hey, darling," he said. He said it casually; he said it like it didn't mean anything. And it didn't.

She didn't mean anything, at least not to him.

"Hey," she said without enthusiasm, leaning over the back of the couch, where he was slumped, and bestowing a perfunctory kiss on his cheek.

He turned his head slightly to accept it, but his eyes stayed focused on the TV screen.

Did he deserve it? Deserve the anger collapsing her affection and restraint? She didn't know, and at this point, that also didn't matter. He had stopped paying attention to her years ago, and that is a slow, gasping death for love to have.

She threw off her coat and her shoes. The latter did not follow her aim and banged with an obtrusive clatter into the metal trashcan. It toppled, and out spilled the papery evidence of their coming despair.

So many bills. She had stopped counting them. Stopped worrying about them. They would overtake the couple soon, she knew, and with a vengeance. There was no escape. Only waiting. And languishing under her sorry excuse of a life.

The noise attracted his attention, something she could not manage. He saw the ominous innards of the wastebasket, and she saw that he realized what they were. But while she was a woman who was content to wait for destruction, he was a man who pretended it didn't exist.

His gaze mechanically turned to the TV, and the prospect of eviction and possibly imprisonment was pushed from his mind in his senseless enjoyment of the rough action movie flickering across the screen.

What would he do when they cut the cable? Probably take to drinking to numb his mind, she thought bitterly. If only she could to. If only she could leave him to handle this on his own.

She could not. She had no basis to hate him, and that was what punched her in the gut. He did the same things, performed the same actions, spoke the same endearments, but without the same feeling. They had been alive in each other, and now they were dead without each other.

So she went into the bedroom, laid down, and fell asleep.

*

A/N: Does anyone get much else than bills in the mail these days? All I get are bank statements and the occasional coupon. Whee.

This is based on a woman I know.