The man stood just outside the bar, trembling, going through cigarettes faster than a triathalon winner being chased by a mob. He seemed strangely familiar, although the young man could not seem to recognize him.
"What are you looking at?" he said, his annoyance and nerves expressed in a cloud of tobacco smoke.
"Nothing," he muttered, quickly diverting his gaze to the ground as he took the next step in.
The rest of the faces within were unfamiliar in the dim light. The young man didn't notice the few who wore genuine smiles in response to those they spoke to, only the majority, mirroring his own weary expression. Among the low-lit tables and the counter itself, were faces which could have been ten years older or five years younger than the young man himself, but all comfortable in the place he had never once entered before. He had traversed a few dives, as well a couple of nicer establishments, but the young man was not searching for any sort of class. Taking a sip of his drink at the counter, he attempted to see the world differently, as he always tried during moments such as this, finding the usual disappointment at the bottom of the mug.
As duly noted, the place in which the moment occurred never particularly mattered. No matter how many times he felt that second, he would still see the images in his mind. And when he stumbled out minutes before whichever bar closed, it was always the same. Always the same, with the streetlights and the dark skies, and the bright blue and deep red in his head, just behind the thin page of reality before him.
And home he arrived again, vacant as always.
---
The young man took full responsibility for the place he had ended up; the debt he still had to pay off, the work that took his sleep, all the motions his life had become. Loss, as life-altering as it was, had only given him a new routine. Each day, he questioned it. After all, now he had only himself to care for, only himself to have concern over.
His space was smaller now; he didn't need to live in a haunted house, though the ghosts followed him regardless, so he lived in an apartment, two incredibly short hours from what he had considered his home. He had tried so hard to go further from there, and now he merely hid in plain sight. He understood now the ambition to leave behind a difficult history. And it would only make sense that he simply could not go any further. That the twine that bound him to such a history was actually strong and stout and only slightly elastic.
In the years since he understood this lonely ambition, outside of the people he no longer saw alive, was the destruction of another car and the addition of more debt and pain and medication, and the long hours spent trying to return to some point beyond the first time that still lived in his mind. What insurance gave him was decent enough, but work would remain necessary, probably for years, to pay off everything else.
Once again, he found his nearly comforting daily thought as he peered out of his fifth floor window. There were angles he could land, there were so many things he could take, and perhaps he wouldn't be found for days, but who would care, really. He was quite solitary now; there was hardly anyone he knew now that he could think of whom would be exactly upset by such actions...
And the phone rang, as it did on days like this one.
"Hello?" the young man answered, not bothering to give out the name of whom the caller had reached. It was not even necessary to check the caller's identity.
"Hey, Damir. We just thought we'd touch base with you tonight."
As if they didn't call every Friday evening.
"Mhmm. I'm fine, Mrs._"
"You know, it's completely fine for you to call us by our first names," said the man who took the phone for that moment.
"Alright. Sorry, Trent. Anna. Everything's going great tonight, you... really didn't need to go through all the effort... to call, or anything..."
"It's no effort at all! You know that... we're just checking in. We like to hear from you, you know. You're..."
Like a son to us. He knew that's what they meant, that's how they always spoke to them. He thought of their own apparition, the ghosts that still wandered their own home.
"Feel free to see us sometime, son."
The man said it outright, often. Though it seemed like a typical masculine term, applied mentor to mentee, or simply to a man many years younger than oneself, when used traditionally, but he knew the deeper meaning beneath it.
"It's almost Thanksgiving, after all... do you want to come down?"
They always seemed to call, right at that moment at the end of his week. Never any earlier, but never any later. Some kind of twisted, weekly intervention.
"Maybe," he mumbled. "I'll... have to check my schedule."
"Alright. Well, we'll be looking forward to it. We'll call you again, maybe Sunday. Have a good evening."
"You too."
The "end" on the phone was so easy to press, yet he so slowly turned from the window, gradually propelling himself to the shower.
---
In bed that night, were the same waking nightmares. Dutifully, he used the usual medicating methods to bring himself to sleep, but this was not a night in which sleep would come easily. Rather, he saw his parents lying still, sleeping themselves, but deeper than he felt he ever would. And underneath their sleeping eyes, were their own bitter memories. And he saw the ones they experienced as a unit, for he would never know their pasts entirely; this he now accepted.
The shrinks might claim he'd taken three steps forward and two steps back, or something of the sort, but he no longer cared for their thoughts. Nothing they said seemed to appeal to his logic, which they claimed was twisted, but he had seen the results of his own thoughts becoming true, whether or not they were dark or cynical or grief-ridden or just plain "irrational", as one had claimed. He couldn't pay for them anyway. Maybe he would have wanted to change more a few years ago. There were things which shook him, forced him to stay in this place at times, but there were few things which caused him to move. There was no catalyst in his minimal life now. Only the Friday night calls.
He watched, again, as they slammed against windows and heard their own bones cracking, and then again, their eerie stillness. And he heard the screams of their youth.
It was a sham, how they trapped him like this. The promise to call him on Sunday, which he knew they would. The invitation to their home for Thanksgiving. It was almost cruel, but he knew they meant well. He felt the common additions to his guilt, knowing what pain he would cause them if he too, deserted their family. It was acceptable for him to be so full of his own despair, but to cause it, to cause even more than he had, it was simply too much. In only the previous month at the hospital, with their panic, the tiny insight into their fears, he had known it was too high a cost.
Perhaps he was responsible only for himself, but the Senela's did matter to him. He couldn't do that to them.
---
They called, as promised, on Sunday. They were a little chattier than usual. Talking about somewhat trivial things, like the exceptional weather and their conversation with a couple at their church and their cabin by the lake, and had he ever been to the lake? It was only a few hours away.
These two never spoke like this. None of them were ever interested in small talk, and he knew that was not why they called. He kept silent, listening, nodding at the evening hour, taking his pills with coffee as he tried to get ready for a long shift, the cell phone on speaker.
"Is that all you wanted to say?" he interrupted, knowing there was little time left for any conversation.
"We're sorry, we must have wasted so much time with j_"
"No, it's fine," he replied. "Listen, I'll..."
He weighed, as briefly as human possible, the pros and cons of his potential next statement.
"I'll call you back tomorrow."
"Alright... Don't work too hard now, Damir."
In the background, just as he heard the phone click down, he heard the distant sound of another voice, a female voice he hadn't heard in years.
They sure had a lot to talk about.
