West 2

"These eggs taste dry," he said behind his phone, his mouth destroying his breakfast.
"I made 'em just how you like 'em," I defended my cooking but simultaneously prepared for offense. He waited until his third sip of coffee to attack.
"Well they taste dry." This was the dropped, silent, booming bomb that always ended the continuing history of our war. Not that statement exactly, it was his indifferent criticism that struck the blow. Every comment out of his mouth came from between his teeth or under his tongue, but I've learned not to take them to heart. I wished he would yell at me, throw the eggs down, throw them at my face, even; I just couldn't stand the hollow sound of his judgement sounding like a decisive gavel in my trial by carelessness.
"I'll try a different recipe next time," I turned away from him and heard him breath as a response. I made my cup of tea and sat down next to him. He had no idea of my midnight intermission in the ditch, but I wasn't ashamed of him knowing, so I told him while I tamed my hot mug.
"That's....odd," was all he had to say. I blinked, and my eyelids were the only sound in the empty hearth.
"I do it a lot, actually," I added. "I like to look up and think, ya know?"
"Mhm."
"You ever tried it?"
"No."
"Y'oughta try it." I felt daring that morning, so I added, "We should do it together some time." This made him surrender his phone to the tabletop. He looked at me through those black wired glasses that were just thin enough to be transparent but just thick enough to be heart-wrenchingly distant. He sucked the anticipation out of the air.
"I don't think so, Jane," he whispered. He gathered his phone, his keys, his wallet, and his interest into a wad in his hands and stood to leave.
"Leaving this early?" I inquired.
"Have to," he blandly replied. "Last night's game's got everyone on their toes. I'm supposed to meet with the other coaches and work something out."
"Now that's just awful," I said. I was speaking more out of desperation for communication than I was out of actually caring about the subject, although I knew plenty about it. "Kids these days have no sense, I'm tellin' you. No goddamn sense." He quietly folded down his mouth, and with that he left. I sat at the kitchen table and watched his car leave the driveway, leave our house, leave me. I sat for a long time after I heard the engine disappear, sat and stirred my now cold tea, sat and stirred my lukewarm emotions.
I should be used to his indifference by now. Our waters of love were soaked up years ago at the orphanage, and now all that remained was a parched surface with stains in the shape of our own coffee mugs and reserved speech. Our bed could've been a million miles wide with how far I felt from his body whenever I laid in it at night, watching the ceiling as if waiting for it to say the words neither of us had spoken in over a decade.
Suddenly I felt smaller than I had ever felt. I felt, not necessarily alone, but in a world reserved for only me, a world that started at the mailbox and ended under my bedsheets. It's a terrifying thing to be the only one in a place as pressing as that. The walls held me at bay with their spears; the doors' shields wouldn't budge an inch; the windows all repeated the same lies; the closets, the rooms, the basement, all of them demanded that I stay inside of their lightless confines. I watched with howling eyes my future unravel into a short paper as thin and as worthless as a receipt. Was this my cosmic routine? Was I doomed to die inside of a house that I knew better than my own mind and my own world and my own life? My cup of tea tasted sour, and my hands got busy in my pockets. My pains and fears were burning hot in my clammy palms.
Time stopped, and forever was presented to me in the form of a framed photo of myself; my cheeks struggled to hold the corners of my happy lips, eyebrows hardly hiding the look in my eyes that so desperately looked beyond this hole into which I've fallen. This was my cosmic routine. I was doomed to die in this house, ignorant of but yearning for a different world and a different mind and a different life. The anxiety, the carelessness, all of the opinions that persuaded me I wasn't going to do anything propelled me out of my chair. They jeered at my shoulder and my legs, daring me to open the door and start the car and drive. I won their bet.
I was a hundred yards away from the mailbox and going 60 miles per hour before I realized I hadn't even changed out of my robe.