“Anyone can live without love, but no one can thrive.”

--Dying To Laugh

I sat at the dining room table looking at the notes and articles long after Jason left. But I wasn’t reading them or even thinking about them. I wasn’t even thinking about Orvex or Gun or Zipcars or global conspiracies. I was thinking about Anatoly. I imagined Anatoly riding down Highway 1, the roar of his bike intermingling with the roar of the dark ocean. Maybe it would clear his head and he would come back to me happy, ready to do a little more talking, or a lot more lovemaking. I would be happy with either.

But he hadn’t answered when I called. He didn’t want to hear from me. 

So I let the minutes, then the hours tick away as I blindly shuffled through those blog posts, all filled with exclamation marks and italicized words. Ms. Dogz made herself comfortable on the area rug in the living room leaving me in solitude in the dining room. Eventually, I started Googling. About a quarter of the findings in the articles London had hung on his wall seemed to be well supported and widely accepted. The rest, not so much. 

Mr. Katz strolled into the dining room and took a seat in the corner, slowly blinking his eyes at me. “You’re right,” I replied to my cat after I interpreted his blink. “We do live in a time when a growing portion of the population thinks the world is flat. So in comparison, believing GMOs are part of a government conspiracy to lower the cognitive abilities of the mass public isn’t all that outrageous.” 

I put aside the printed article that claimed exactly that and pulled out my phone as if just looking at it could make Anatoly call me. My fingers hovered over the screen as I considered trying him one more time but then thought better of it. The fear I had felt earlier in the evening had subsided. Now I just felt mildly anxious and…sad. I was sad.

But feeling a little sad was a significant improvement on feeling a little empty.

I looked over again at Mr. Katz. His eyes were closed now even as his tail twitched. I thought about Cat London. Was she sleeping well these days? I wondered if she would text or call me tomorrow to firm up the details of our meeting. But she was a teenager so it seemed more likely she would wait until the last minute before thinking to set up any meeting details. And as was the case with Anatoly, I knew that pushing her to communicate on my preferred time schedule would simply end up pushing her further away.

By midnight I found myself in our bed alone, again. He came home not long after that and I held my breath as I waited for him to join me. I quickly crafted a fantasy of a repeat of two nights before…with him sneaking beneath the sheets and my hand sneaking beneath his pajama pants. But although I waited with baited breath and all, he never even entered the room. It was only after listening to a few specific doors open and close and a bathroom sink turn on and off that I realized he was setting up camp in the guest room.

He had never done that before.

I considered barging in there, demanding that we talk about what was going on with us. But what was I supposed to say at this point? And I still hadn’t told him about the newspaper with the underlined headline or the invitation I had received to have dinner with Gundrun Volz and his wife. I suppose he’d accuse me of holding out on him again, keeping a secret. But I knew that what really upset him was not that I was keeping secrets but that I had these particular secrets to keep.

And once again he left the next morning before I had even woken up. A few days earlier Anatoly and I had been fine, I hadn’t had a stalker, no one had been threatening me and I didn’t have an opinion about Zip Cars. I had made a mess of everything.

Except I was writing. 

That day I wrote twenty-seven pages. Twenty-seven good pages. 

I was beginning to wonder if my creative spirit was somehow tied to the spirits of Hell. At this rate, I’d have to actually burn the house down just to find the motivation to finish the first three chapters.