tag

she picked up the receiver and was met with the staggering tone of a voice-mail alert. not expecting anything more than the usual "This is Bank of America" or "Please call ____ when you receive this message", she readied her finger over the 3 to delete quickly. the first two were as she thought, companies wanting their money back. if she had it, she'd give it to them, just to make the calls stop. but she didn't, so they continued, and she deleted. third call was to confirm her date and directions to his house. easy enough. she skipped over it quickly, jotting down what she needed and moving on. 4th and final, ready again at the '3', her body stiffened before the voice even began. him. he'd called. a month of no calls. weeks without word. nothing more than a two word text message in all this time. him. he'd called.

she had sort of set it up that way. asked in an email that she was sure he wouldn't read if he'd commented on her live journal. the smart guess was no, but it had his biting tone. it had his arrogance. and she missed him just enough to tie those two thin threads together. so, he'd called to say it wasn't him. he'd been busy. very busy. (he always is.) "call or drop me a line" was how he'd ended it. did the irony of that not strike him? she'd been doing that for a month and never a word in return. she'd all but begged for him to answer her.

it was the polite thing to say at the end of the message. sure comes off nicer than, "fuck off and die", she thought. but wasn't that really what his absence, his silence, his indifference had been saying? or was this a game of "who can care less and make the other want more?" the only game she played was 'connect four', so she wasn't in the mood for a round of emotional battleship. he'd already sunken everything she had put out there. he'd demolished her fleet of good intentions and kind words. what more was there to kill? her heart? her soul? her tenuous grip on reality?

still poised over the 3, ready to delete, she didn't. she backed off a button, hit 2, and saved the message. why? this flabbergasted word spit visibly from her lips. did she plan on dissecting the call, interpreting his voice and modular changes in tone? was she going to play it over and over and over for hidden meanings? was this just to preserve the sound of his voice in her head?

she isn't this girl. she isn't the girl who has to sit by the phone and wait for a call. she could call her lover. one of them. she could go to a bar and be in a stranger's arms within an hour. so why, why was she allowing this slight man to slight her? he'd been less than a memory not very long ago. and his lackluster return to her life was one should be able to simply put aside. he should have been forgotten the moment he left her house that day.

it was the game. she had somehow succumbed to his game. and his game had started the day he had left. before closing his car door and driving away he had said something about "playing hard to get". and from that moment on she had been losing.