Day 239 - Lonely Story

Lonely Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Arnold had a sinkhole where his heart used to be. One day Emily was there, and the next she wasn’t. Nothing was the same after that. It was the defining moment of his existence. There was before the end and there was after the end. That was the only division that mattered. That was the division that determined everything.

The sinkhole formed overnight and it dragged everything down with it – love, happiness, joy, energy, desire and a million other emotions. They all fell into the pit of despair. He was left numb – a state of empty emotion and a state of indifference.

It wasn’t her fault. He knew it wasn’t her fault. He made the sinkhole. He lived in the sinkhole. Those were all choices. He just didn’t know how to undo them.

Arnold loved women. He loved a lot of women. He couldn’t properly remember ‘before,’ but he was fairly certain he had that naïveté all youth possess when they haven’t really known love. They have wild emotional states and it’s dramatic, but it isn’t really love. He had had those mood swings, jealousy, lust, rage and all the rest. He had what in the moment seemed special and unique, but in retrospect is obvious to just be one more commonality amongst the human condition. He knew the ‘after’ pretty well. He was still living the ‘after.’ During the ‘after’ period he continued to physically love women, but forgot all about what the emotion felt like. He had an emotional sinkhole and tried to fill it with strange and random vaginas, the way too many people tried far too often, and had the same limited success.

Arnold was looking for salvation. He was looking for one of them to be his savior. He had a sinkhole where his heart should be and he expected them to somehow fill it for him.

The mornings were lonely. The nights were lonely. Lying in an empty bed was lonely. Lying next to a strange woman was lonely.

Arnold had a dream that seemed like white noise and a serene void that was neither here nor there, but was connected to space and time and all creation. The world was fuzz and crackles like an old TV that couldn’t find a signal or a record with grooves too rough. The dream was a moment. It was a feeling. It was a blur. Arnold woke up and kept an ounce of that serenity. The morning was very Zen. The night was one too many drinks and one too few bad pickup lines. He wandered the streets, drunk, stumbling, barely able to find his way. He was amazed he had found his way home at all. That night he couldn’t remember his dreams. That morning he was rotten and he sank lower than before.

Arnold immediately fixed himself a drink to try to curb the pounding in his head. He sat on his couch and tried to will himself to fill the void. He told himself to do it. He envisioned it. He negotiated and bribed himself. He told himself everything he wanted to hear.

None of it was true. None of it filled the hole.

He lay down on the bed and stayed there for a very long time. He hoped for salvation but didn’t know how to work for it. He hoped the hole would fill on its own. He drank another drink and helped whatever footing had been made to just slide away along with the drunken despair.

The sinkhole got worse, but Arnold slept. The sinkhole consumed him, so he just wept. He didn’t even bother to reach for it. He was comfortable in the hole. He didn’t want to get out. He couldn’t see the top anymore. The darkness was his new home. The darkness was all around him. He just lay there and slept, not knowing what else to do. No one came to find him. No one knew the sinkhole was there or that he was trapped. He hadn’t told anyone. He hadn’t tried. Instead Arnold slept.