Maybe One Day
I was sat mindlessly staring into my half empty glass in front of me, watching the bubbles rise and disappear as they reached the top. I swirled it around slightly to coax more of them to the surface, even if my reason for doing so wasn’t that clear. Harsh words and stamping feet came from the other two. They were still going nowhere fast.
“You knew they were going to do it, you fucking knew!” Curiosity getting the better of me, I took my attention off my beer and saw that Fisher had now stood up from that dreadful moth-eaten sofa of his and was heatedly growling at Lauren, who had propped herself up in the doorway to the kitchen opposite, a bottle of crappy wine loosely held to her chest. “Yet you fucking let it happen anyway!” Lauren just made an indecipherable noise of displeasure, Fishers verbal assault apparently robbing her of any ability to properly fight back. “The one fucking time Lauren. The one fucking time!”
“Well, what the fuck do you care anyway?!” Lauren slammed her body into the door frame, whether it was a result of either the explosiveness of her words or an attempt to pull herself from the brink of death she found herself teetering on I don’t know. “The only time you ever get roused from your fucking corpse-like state is when I do something that you don’t like!” The ferocity of her words seemed to catch even her off guard as she messily stumbled into the room and fell in a heap onto me and the chaotic pile of dirty laundry and eviction notices that was to be my bed for the evening. Instinctively I held my arms out to catch her, tossing aside my drink in the process. I didn’t pay any attention to Fisher’s yells of protest as my beer spilt onto the floor, didn’t want to. Even through the smell of sweat, cigarettes and regret, she was still wearing that perfume I bought for her last Christmas.
“You clumsy bitch, look what you’ve done now! You should’ve fucking let her smash her face open.” The sound of a lighter furiously trying and failing to be sparked into life came as a result of Fishers anger, followed by a clatter as it hit the wall opposite. Lauren rolled off me, though with her long unkempt hair still strewn across my face. She mumbled some incoherent insults towards Fisher, blankly staring at the ceiling and writhing around in the confused clutter, as if the mere act of existing was agony for her. Turning away from her I found my now empty glass lying in pieces at Fishers bare feet. It was unusually pretty for what it was, the shattered glass. It seemed to magnify the dull light in the room to an almost hypnotic degree. Almost made it seem that we didn’t exist in a place that light had forgotten. Not wanting to just stay there staring at the twinkling glass shards, I grabbed the wine bottle from Lauren and took a bold swig. I felt my throat sting slightly as I did. It always did that when I drank, it was just something I had gotten used to by that point. I gently massaged my throat, knowing that it’d do no good as ever, but feeling compelled to try and ease the pain regardless.
“Maybe it’d be best to drop it yeah?” I croaked, my raspy voice adding a harsher tone to my words than intended. Staring into my reflection in the bottle I could see hollowed and blank eyes that didn’t seem to be my own staring back at me.
“Why are you trying to get in on this conversation anyway? You’ve barely picked your head up from your fucking beer, as usual.”
“I don’t know.” I answered. “It’s all just a little bit sad really isn’t it? What we are, what we’ve done… what we could’ve done.” The whole room went cold, the light of the world had once again been snuffed out. The broken glass became as dull as everything else. “Maybe one day, we’ll realise how good we had it.”
Looking up from my bottle I was met with silence and nervous looks. Nobody seemed to know what to say, or rather they knew what they wanted to say but decided against it.
I turned my head back down to the bottle and saw that my reflection wouldn’t even look back at me, as soft weeping echoed in the kitchen.