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"Did you love me? Tell me at least. Did you even love me?"
The world is full of discord and my living room is no exception.
"Did you even love me? Answer me you cold son of a bitch!"
I wonder if she used a coaster before, when she had that glass of orange juice with ice.
"You… you're," her face is pulled back in a snarl, her brown hair is messy and her eyes are signals of rage, the dark brown is live and angry. And I hope she stays angry, because I can handle angry. It's when she starts to cry that I feel bad.
"I don't know what to say. I'd like you to stay. There's no need for us to break up. This thing you're mad about, it's not really that bad."
"He was your best friend. You should have protected him, but you turned him away. He's the only person I've even seen you so much as show more than one tiny flicker of emotion with, Nate. What happened?"

Am I supposed to tell her, the reason why I'm emotionally unexpressive, sensitively impaired?
"He was caught selling marijuana. He broke the law."
"And is that what you are? A rule machine? You just agree with the law. No thoughts of your own. It violates some rule so it's wrong?"
"It is wrong."
"He didn't kill anyone, Nate."
"Haven't you heard the saying drugs kill, Rachel?"
She stops. Hand still in the air, ready to launch another point, gesticulating heavily like she does.
"Nathan, what do you mean?" her voice is soft and low.
"Nothing, just drop it." Because I can't relive it, even if it would make her feel better, even it would explain everything, so she'd take me in her arms and call me a poor baby. Say it's not my fault. What an asshole I am.
"I can't do this, Nate. You're just never here anymore. You're charming, you're witty, you're smart as hell. You're intense. You changed my life. You can make me feel so good, but you can make me feel so damn bad. Worse than anyone else."

Something inside me rattles my resolve, begging me to tell her. Please, this stupid voice inside me says, don't let her leave us. We don't want to end up alone again.
"I had some bad experiences with drugs as a child," I say blandly.
"What sort of experiences?" she demands.
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Well I do."
"Well you don't own me, Rach. I will talk about it when I'm ready."
"Which you won't be. Because you're determined to keep me locked out. To have your little secrets. What could be so damned bad you can't tell me? I love you Nathan. And that's a full time job. It gets fucking exhausting, when you just have to guess that the other person loves you back. It's just a blind hope, isn't it?"

I ask her, does she want me to propose to her. Some sort of tangible commitment.
She screams, loud rage, piercing, crushing me inside my head.

She walks into the bedroom and starts throwing her stuff into the suitcase she got out of the closet last week. It's already got a little pack of toiletries, mini shampoos and conditioners. Funny, how it finally stings, looking at her well planned escape. Listening to her speech.
I say as quietly as I can, "I did love you. I do love you. It's just stronger some times than others. My feelings can get kind of… thin." Lately, I haven't felt it at all. And it really isn't her. I'm just too numb. Like an ice pack on my emotional gland, it always comes at the right time. Six weeks ago, I learnt my father died. I didn't feel any pain. I just felt more numb.
She doesn't say anything. Her lips tight, she must think I don't mean it. "It isn't enough," she tells me, moving onto the second drawer of the bureau, "to love somebody occasionally."
"I know. But I wanted you to know, I guess. I feel more than I let on."
"No, you don't," she corrects me, "I felt it when you loved me. You smiled, you laughed, you held me. You were beautiful, Nate. Our love was…"
A car honks outside. I ask her, who's that waiting for her.
She tells me to go fuck myself, as she moves onto the third drawer, jeans and slacks. I just stand there, powerless to prevent her escape. I feel like a useless, pathetic spectator in my own life. My mouth is shut too tightly. I can't say anything more to her that I haven't already said. So I have to let her leave, although grabbing her arm and forcing her to look at me is tempting. Grabbing her, holding her to too tight and yelling at her, "I care about you so much, I don't think I can let you go. Let me present my undying love to you. I bought you some hand cuffs, sweetheart. A collar, and some rope. Crawl for me. You bitch. You can't cheat me into being alone, to sit and watch TV and drink and travel through time to the horrible past. I really can't allow you to leave Rachel, don't, stay, please..."
But I can't love her any more. She's just something I need.

She finishes packing and gives me a long, appraising look. "I thought I could fix you. But I couldn't. I was given an impossible task." Just like that she damns me.
She gives me a couple of seconds, the stilted right of response, then she shakes her head. She leaves me in the bedroom. The front door slams.

Damaged. Ruined. Nothing. Abandoned. I start to sway on my feet, so much pain comes up, pain that I've suppressed, I think I'll choke on it. Like pool water filling my lungs standing up. I get myself to the kitchen and there's no noise, there's just the ocean washing through my ears. That sea that threatens to drown me. I take my pills out of the medicine cabinet, vodka in the other hand. I take anti depressants and pain killers and a large mouthful of alcohol. I guess you could call this a cry for help, but I think my liver can take it. It probably has calluses on it.

I sit in the dark and think about Rachel. I leave the bottle resting next to me on the TV table. I think about the first time we had sex, how it seemed like the most important thing in the world to get her clothes off. That if I could just have her, I'd be saved.

I flick through channels and 2 a.m insanity sets in. Ads for knives and dust cloths and exercise machines that will fix your life. I start watching something called Slasher in the Rain. The guy in the trench stalks the pretty co-ed in the rain, and she turns around, but doesn't see him. He gets closer. The music heightens, tenses, singalling a pending kill. I turn it off. I stumble to my room and crash in my bed, allowing the plaque to build up on my teeth. Some days, I don't want to sleep.

I'm seven years old again. I'm walking up stairs in the huge mansion. Every stair creaks. It's older than time. I'm scared but I push the door open again, the one on the second floor. In the room is my mother, levitating a foot off the bed, her head hanging back and blood pouring from her neck, down her chest, onto the bed spread. Rivers off it, down her chest and her cut throat. She's wearing soaking brown rags. Her hair is wet. The covers are splashed with blood, it forms wet, oozing streams on the off white spread. I try to rip myself out of this dream, this not-quite reality. I have to get out.

The blue light from my mobile pierces the darkness in the kitchen. Kitchens are the quietest places in the world at night. The calm centre of the house. I send Mark a message, telling him, I'm sorry that I didn't bail him out. But he knows why.

My mother was murdered by a drug dealer when I was five. The drug dealer was my father. He got five concurrent life sentences. Because they had to use dental record to identify my mother. What the coroner called, "A frenzied, drug fuelled attack." Forty six stab wounds. I never saw her body. That's what makes it so much worse. My head fills in the details in brilliant, bloody gore. It must have been bloody. And I'm stuck. I'm still a stupid, confused seven year old boy, with a cop explaining that Mommy's gone "to God." It doesn't help.

I'm the remnants of her life, the stupid pale, genetic imitation of my mother. A sorry excuse. A humourless joke. The tough kid that grew up in a group home, I realise now that I'm a coward. If I could just love Rachel. If I could just be good enough for her. But it's too late. There's only silence.

I'm fucked up. No one can save me.