Your phone rings.  Normally, this is not a cause for concern; however, you're at a particular interval in the sine wave of your life that means the sudden incandescent illumination of your shitty, old iPhone in tandem with the loud, rhythmic vibrations against your glass coffee table elicit a certain instantaneous anxiety that breaks you out of the mindless stupor caused by your current attempt to deaden your mind with old episodes of Hell’s Kitchen.

You immediately weigh the three potential options for who could be interrupting your Gordon Ramsey-induced coma against a hastily calculated Potential Anxiety Level.  Number one (low level anxiety, barely even registers) – it’s your dad, he wants to ask if you’d like to get dinner this weekend and inquire as to whether or not you’ve called your grandpa yet.  You wish your dad could figure out text messaging.  Number two (medium level anxiety, you won’t pick up the phone) – it’s the student loan people again, informing you – as if you’d forgotten – that you’re behind on your payments, and if there’s anything they can do to help. The final option (DEFCON 2 level anxiety, the thought alone causes you to mentally triangulate where you left your pack of cigarettes, but you will almost certainly pick up the phone) is her.  You’re coming up on three weeks of not talking, and the timing is just about right.

You un-splay yourself from your couch, lifting up the left leg that you’ve draped lazily across the back of the couch and the right leg that’s resting on the headrest of the opposite side.  You decide that it’s funny to twirl and twist your legs on the way down in the way that an overly zealous, out of shape Zatoichi movie swordsman who’s a few too many sushi rolls away from being able to do a proper kip-up might do. You imagine you resemble the strings of a broken weed wacker.  This is only ever going to be funny to you.  After your failed half-garden-tool half-fat-ninja maneuver, your feet are firmly planted on the ground and your back is straight.  You are calm, you are composed, and you are ready to see who has disturbed your waking slumber.

You grab your phone by its long axis and tilt it towards you to read the name.  DEFCON 2.  Left pocket of your coat, and there’s probably one on top of the dryer.  You stand up, immediately walk over to your coat that you threw on top of the recliner when you came in from work, and reach in to your left pocket.  Marlboro Menthols.  Okay, check.  You walk down the hallway, past your dog who has clearly noticed something is wrong, past your bathroom that has far too many beard hairs that you missed wiping up this morning, past your bedroom that’s still not entirely unpacked from when you moved three months ago, and you make it to the laundry room.  You look on top of the dryer.  A lighter.  Score.  You are now half-running towards your ultimate destination – the deck in your back yard.  You estimate you have about 4 vibrations left.  Your dog has become worried and is now following you.  You worry about her knees, and can’t remember if you gave her her painkillers today.  Three vibrations left.  You pass your kitchen, and are amazed that you found the deep motivational power within you to do the dishes last night.  You feel a twinging sense of accomplishment.  Two vibrations left.  You reach down from between the sliding glass door and the door frame to lift up the wooden shim, and slide the door out.  You step outside and with the speed that only a pack a day smoker possesses you light your cigarette before answering the phone.  She hates when you smoke, and you’d rather her not hear the flick of your lighter.

One vibration left.

You prepare to lower your voice that one extra half-octave.

“Hey”

“Oh, I’m alright.  You?”

“Yeah, I feel that.  Fucking 40-hour work week, man.”

“It’s okay.  I think I’m gonna be up for another promotion soon.  I finished these huge projects for a couple new clients and they ended up signing more contracts with us.  Ben was pretty impressed.  How’s things over in Transylvania?”

“Transylvania.  Tran-sill-vain-yuh.  Like, where Dracula lived?  How have you never heard of that?  I think it’s in Romania.  I’m making a joke about them sucking out your life force.  Or something.  I don’t fucking know, let me try that again.  How are things over at the state?”

You know this is going to be a long-winded reply.  You’ve asked this strategically so you can be approximately 50 percent involved in the conversation with a series of “uh-huh’s” and “oh yeah?’s” while you get a chance to smoke your cigarette.

“Wow, that’s wild.  Oh yeah?  Jeez, seriously?  What a dick.”

This goes on for several minutes.  You are caught in a whirlwind of petty office drama, stories of coworkers’ husbands having ulterior motives after they invite her over to play D&D, and an overwhelming onslaught of cubicle-induced ennui.  You latch on to every word, every detail, every change of inflection and intonation.  You have forgotten what this girl does to you when she tells stories.  You slowly feel the field of dead sunflowers revivifying and sprouting again deep inside your guts.

“The private sector?  It’s okay.  I work and travel too much.  Sometimes it can feel really hard to get my feet underneath me.  I’ve lived in the new house for three months now and it still feels like a strange place.  I’ve been getting this deep, unsettling feeling of loneliness and anxiety if I have to spend too much time in a hotel room lately.  I have had way too many deep oversharing sessions with strange bartenders who I’m never going to see again.  But financial comfort comes at a price, I guess.”

“Yeah, I’ve always told you to come with me when I go out for drinks with Sarah and all them.  Either that or just quit and do something else.  Your goofy half-baked money schemes always just leave you stressed out and I’ve never understood why you don’t listen to me when I tell you exactly what’s going to happen.  Remember when you tried to get a second job as a waitress?  I called that before your first shift even started.”

The laugh that always gets you in to trouble.

“She’s okay.  She’s been responding really well to treatment and her tumors are down some huge percentage that I can’t remember off the top of my head.  You know her – she wasn’t gonna take any shit from something as boring as cancer.”

“I will.  I think we’re supposed to grab dinner tomorrow.  She’s got her appetite back, and it’s nice to not have James policing her plate when he doesn’t understand she’s just extremely nauseous.  But you know him, he means well.  How’s Ody?”

“Yeah, that starts to chill out after they turn about three.  Penny used to wreak havoc on everything in my old apartment when I first adopted her.  Did I ever tell you about the time she got out of her travel crate like fucking Houdini and shredded every single part of my bed?  She managed to get cotton across every square inch of my floor.  It somehow even invaded the fucking apartment hallway.  I bet all my neighbors fucking hated me.”

“Yeah, she’s doing okay.  Can’t really walk for more than a couple miles.  I have to carry her home when I walk her sometimes.  I imagine it looks cute to some people, but in my head it’s just this constant reminder of how old she’s getting.  It really bugs me, honestly.”

“Oh fuck, yeah, the Joe Rogan-looking dude?  Holy shit, that guy was such a goon.  Remember how he told us he buried a pile of money somewhere in Arizona before he had to serve his prison sentence?  Like, come on dude, I’ve seen Shawshank Redemption too. All that in the same breath as saying he played guitar so well that he was the reason Chester Bennington killed himself.  Man, what an idiot.  I’ll never forget how that whole thing ended though.  We had been dating for what, three or four months?  That was when I knew you were a bad bitch.”

“I don’t know man.  I feel like our timelines are definitely not equal on that.  What’s our anniversary according to you?”

“Really?  I mean, that was the first time you came over to quote-unquote study – I just did air quotes, for reference.  But the first time I actually asked you out and we went to that bullshit hipster-ass brunch place was what, two months after that?  I know, I know.”

“I feel like mine is more accurate.”

“You are entitled to your opinion.”

DEFCON 4.  You're close to disarmed.

“Nothing.  To be honest, I’m kind of embarrassed to even say what I was doing before you called.”

“Get your mind out of the gutter.  That’s child’s play level embarrassment anyway, kink-shamer.”

“Maybe.  I don’t know.”

“Because I thought we agreed that last time was, you know, the last time.”

“We know where this goes.”

“It never ends up just being us just ‘hanging out’, and you know that.”

“Are you serious?  You sat with your hand on my dick under the table the entire time we were there.”

“I don’t know.  I feel this cognitive dissonance of not knowing how to not be in love with you, but constantly fighting against it.  Like a fucking anadromous fish.”

“Anadromous.  Like a salmon.  Maybe only salmon, actually.  They swim upstream.  I’m saying I swim upstream against you.”

“Because we fight too much.  Because we never love each other at the same time.  Because everything feels so incredible until it comes crashing down over something acutely idiotic thing that we refuse to figure out together because our egos are too big and we don’t know how to compromise.”

“I know that.”

“I know that, too.”

“Sorry, I’m not trying to come off that way.  I spend a lot of time thinking about this.”

“I know you do.  You are nothing if not a creature of… internalization?  Is that a thing?  You know what I mean.  That’s my favorite thing about you.  You know you could look like that girl from Shrek and I’d still love you, right?  After she turned all green and shit, I mean.”

“More cushion for the pushin’.”

“I know you do.  You’re insane if you think I don’t want to see you, too.”

“Every day.  It’s the worst if I have long periods by myself to just think.  My commute has been a slow drip of increasingly aggressive and loud music.”

“I already told you.”

“Obviously I love you.  What part of what I said could possibly make you doubt that?”

“Because before I met you I felt like I only had one broken heart left, and you’ve broken it a half-dozen times.”

“I know I have.  I am not trying to act blameless.”

Yesterday you spent an hour in your car rehearsing a speech for what you’d say if you ever found yourself in this exact spot.  It was not a nice speech.  Why do those words always vanish from your head whenever you get talking to her?  Pussy.

“Okay, fine.  I think you’re right.  I hate having conversations like this over the phone.  No body language to read.”

“Sorry.  Let’s just talk more when I get there.  I don’t have your new address, can you text it to me?”

“Okay.  I’ll text you when I’m on my way.”

You are stupid.  You are a stupid, stupid idiot.  You smell like smoke.  Take a shower before you leave.  What cheesy line are you going to say when she opens the door?  Make sure the dog has food and water before you go.  The white Adidas or your new Ultraboosts?  Cologne?  No, that’s stupid.  Did you eat dinner?  Did she eat dinner?  I’m going to smoke another cigarette before I leave.  Addendum: I’m going to smoke another cigarette right now.  Don’t tell your roommates where you’re going, you know what they’re going to say.  They already know where you’re going, you’ve been out on the back deck talking on the phone with the door closed.  That only ever means one thing.  Fuck, did I wash my hair today already?  Should I bring my weed?  She’ll want to smoke.  Especially if she hasn’t eaten dinner yet.  Are we gonna go out?  What’s near where she lives?  Where DOES she live now?  Okay, finish your cigarette and get in the shower.

Twenty minutes later you are putting on your white Adidas with the small scuff mark on the left toe.  You check her address – she lives much closer to you now than she did before.  You text her that you’re on the way.  You still aren’t sure what you’ll say when she opens the door.  You are at DEFCON 5.