Will only listened to two songs.
Last Hope by Paramore during his workout and The Wild Wild’s When We Were Young while he fell asleep.
His days had become a perfect routine. This was less of a conscious decision, more a system for coping that fell into place without much notice.
6:00 a.m. – Slide out of bed and brush his teeth. Turn off When We Were Young.
6:15 a.m. – Go for a 45 minute run, listen to Last Hope on repeat. The song was 5 minutes and 9 seconds long, which meant it played just under 8 times before he got back to the door of his apartment on the fourth floor.
7:00 a.m. – Shower, make breakfast, drive to work.
7:30 a.m. – Work is mostly spreadsheets and math.
6:00 p.m. – Roll away from the desk, grab his coat, and head to the gym.
6:30 p.m. – 60 minutes of weights and 15 minutes of abs. Just over 13 plays of Last Hope.
7:45 p.m. – Cook and eat supper. Chicken thighs, eggs, and a spinach salad with French dressing.
8:30 p.m. – Ignore the texts and calls from former friends and siblings. Read through the stack of overdue 17th century history books he had borrowed from the library.
9:55 p.m. – Crawl into bed and play When We Were Young. Finally, let one tear slowly run down his cheek, it changing direction at his jaw line and dropping onto his comforter before reaching his chin.
9:59 p.m. – The single tear has turned into a sob, muffled by the blanket he’s pulled over his head. He lets the exhaustion of the day, coupled with the pain in his gut rock him to sleep.
Every single day.
Years ago, Will had purposed that if he ever lost someone, he wouldn’t turn to drugs, or food, or drink, or women to deal with the pain. He didn’t know the specifics of what he’d do, but it would be a drug of routine, of control.
Now, Will had no memory of his past resolution. The predictable life he had created was more of an instinct.
And technically, he hadn’t lost anyone.
But the separation and then divorce of his parents hit his heart in a way that made him feel like he had lost something.
Maybe it was his childhood for which he mourned. Or the warmth and safety with which a home untouched by brokenness brings you, the knowledge that there’s somewhere solid to fall back to if things don’t work out.
He felt dumb for the extreme way he had dealt with the situation. His siblings had reminded him that at least half of marriages don’t work out. Why was he cutting them out of his life? Why didn’t he answer the texts? The texts that made his phone buzz less and less now.
Will didn’t know why. He didn’t know why he never took a rest day from his workouts. He didn’t know why he had pleaded with his boss for a key to the office so he could come in on Saturdays and Sundays to keep his routine intact.
He didn’t blame his parents for their breakup. Loving another person fully for your whole life is an almost impossible task. He knew that.
But, he also knew that a whole world was gone. A world with intimacy and innocence that couldn’t be remembered without a black lining of sadness and regret. Will felt as if all the nostalgia of his youth was now tainted by the tear of two former lovers whose love had soured.
He hadn’t lost his parents and he felt guilty for the sobs he let out every night, feeling as if they should be reserved for a true loss—a death or life altering accident.
Maybe that guilt was why he refused to let anyone back in.
The pain of his shins receiving impact from the pavement every morning was to repay the debt of his guilt.
The numbers he crunched at work dulled the reality of his loss.
The weight he pushed and pulled at the gym provided a solidity that the loss had taken from him.
He played his two songs on repeat in a vain effort to hypnotize himself, the lyrics and voice never quite satisfying his buried hope of healing.
On the outside, he looked more than healthy. His life appeared all that of self-discipline and consistency.
On the inside, he wasted away.
The refusal of human contact beat down his soul.
A heart with no trust and a head with no mind for the good things of the future—these robbed him and left him broken himself.
The world he had lost to his parents was not the only world lost.
The facade he called his life now, that too was a world lost. One that Will wasn’t sure he’d ever recover.