The Certainty

I woke up in the morning with a nagging feeling.

He'd made me cry the night before; partly because we both had had too much to drink, and partly because he knew the words - I loved his words when I could forget that they were lies, but most of the time, they just made me cry over their lack of reality.

When I woke up that morning, I knew.

It was yet another of those annoying hunches I kept getting; another one of those ideas that just unexpectedly went blinking in my mind. The kind of certainty I'd calmly lay before him, only to see him widen his eyes and exclaim: How did you KNOW???

The kind of intuition that always turned out to be accurate, no matter what.
I couldn't help it.

He was napping in the afternoon, and I couldn't stand the stillness. I needed to get away, so without a sound I grabbed my phone and my keys and got out, careful not to slam the door.

He wasn't asleep and he heard me, but he didn't move; nobody could've faked it better than us.

And that is when I knew what it felt like to drown.

The world was all around me, but I had nowhere to go, nothing to call mine, no place to disappear into.

The sun was shining, but tears kept rolling down my cheeks, from behind my sunglasses; the kids were running around, but all I could do was lie on a bench and pray for time to pass by.

A fantasy: starting over right now from some motel room. It could never happen, but in an ideal world, it would.

That is when I knew what it was to be lost.

And there still had been no fucking phone call.