Vorfreude

Chapter 33

One thing about anxiety that people without anxiety do not understand is there are these waves that come and go and each time you never know how they'll affect you. Sometimes you cry, sometimes you scream, sometimes you pass the fuck out and sometimes regardless of how much you think you have it handled when it consumes you, there's nothing you can do about it. Anxiety affects everyone differently each time that it decides to take a swing at your mental establishment.

I didn't pass out as I thought I did though, more so I went into a living, zombie coma.

I grabbed the small bear and curled into the cold mattress, tears escaping my eyes without coherency. My phone laid right beside it, placed delicately so I would see it, and there was a text from him.

"I'm so sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me. I need to work on myself and I can't do that here. I'll let you know when I make it home. I love you. P.S. you forgot blue; he's been lonely without you."

There was no emoji afterward.

There's always an emoji.

My body grew heavy with the amount of anxiousness that was weighing in on my chest. I was physically lying still in this room, but mentally, I was gone.

I couldn't look Oliver in the face when he came in some time ago. He tried to talk to me, but I couldn't coax a word he said. It didn't matter. Nothing he could say to me would matter. What mattered to me was Anthony was gone.

In the 15 years I've known him, Anthony has never left a situation. Yes, it's a given when we were at our apartment together and he'd have his man PMS, he'd lock himself in his room for a while but he would never leave. No matter the situation, we've always packed to each other that we'd never leave during a disagreement because no one should ever have to go to bed angry or upset or deal with the fact that life changes so abruptly and that neither one of us would want to lose a person on those terms.

But he left.

And he didn't say goodbye.

I don't remember much else after that as I found myself drifting off into a not so pleasant slumber.

Anthony actually left me.

Now I'm left to face a challenge I never dreamed plausible.

*****

The room around me is dark when my eyes flutter open. I can make out Oliver's body is asleep in his bed across from me and facing in my direction. I reach across the bed and search for my glasses. When I find them, I stir in a dizzy complexion. My head hurts. The walls surrounding my skull are pounding in an unrhythmic demeanor.

I sit up against the headboard and pull the sheets closer around me. They still smell of Anthony.

I finally let out a huge sigh and reach across to grab my phone that has tangled itself in the sheets near the foot of the bed. Blue lies directly on the pillow aside me sitting there as if he was placed precisely by someone.

3:16 am my clock reads.

My mind is blank for the first time in a long time. I have no words to match the emptiness that resides inside my soul. I don't understand how any of this has happened. One-minute life was great, the next everything has been turned upside down. I'm not overreacting even though it seems like I am. This is my Anthony that I'm talking about. Nothing involving try to keep him as a constant in my life is overreacting.

I scroll through the notifications on my phone and get on Twitter. Some people have tagged me in photos from the signing yesterday and wrote very kind words about me. I heart as many of them as I can and attempt at retweeting some.