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Mariko often got the feeling that he just wanted to escape from her; that he was simply too polite to end the relationship and leave.
On the table of the small, circular kitchen table was a week old, out of order Sunday Times, as well as a mug of cold coffee, which now found herself sipping from. The coffee tasted strangely good, better than it had tasted when she’d made it that morning, and the late-hour caffeine mitigated the low-level depression which she could feel setting in.
She scanned, or rather, re-scanned, the headlines of the ‘Arts & Leisure’ section and put the paper back down; it was boring, she had already read it, she didn’t know what she had been expecting. A little bit of distraction to pair with the little dose of serotonin provided by the coffee.
Anything.
Anything was better than lying in bed and trying to fall asleep. That just compounded things. That was when she started to over-analyze all the small, irrelevant details that cluttered the air around her head, like particles of dust. Family, work, theater; the world-at-large. The homeless guy who slept outside their building (she never learned his name). Her weight, what people thought about her, her overall growth as a person. She would endlessly pick apart the things she said to people; she couldn’t get over the feeling that she sounded stupid, or inarticulate, or insensitive, or self-involved.
Akari, her sister, was arriving the next day from LA., which added to her anxiety. It didn’t help…
