Sincerely, Mike

06: Auld Lang Syne

The simple, shocking words that had long since fallen from drunken lips had left Mike so numb that he became almost impervious to the passage of time.

The few days that had passed since that eventful and just generically terrible evening had seemed never-ending to him, each one slowly growing longer than the last as he eventually gave up on keeping track of them.

This new day, he conjectured, would be no different from all the others he assumed had passed. It held no hope, no promise, no change; it held only the same bleak and depressing routine as every one that had come before it.

Wake up. Hit the snooze. Wake up again. Eat breakfast. Drop the kids off at school. Come home. Walk the dog. Sit on the couch and watch mindless television. Think about Billie. Cry about Billie. Sit on the couch some more. Pick the kids up from school. Sit on the couch again, this time with the kids. Pretend everything was okay for their sake. Continue sitting on the couch. Eat dinner. Take a shower. Sit in bed. Go to sleep. And repeat.

Over. And over. And over again.

He had already gotten past the first few checkpoints; breakfast was eaten, and the children were at school. He had returned to the dreary comfort of home, and the dog had been walked; he was now in the first of the many quintessential "sit on the couch and mindless watch television" phases of his day.

Staring down at the mismatched socks on his feet sullenly as Ron Swanson and Leslie Knope babbled on in the background, Mike felt the same emptiness he did every day at around this time.

Nothing made him laugh, nothing made him smile. His mind was a blank canvas awash with absolutely nothing at all. Everything around him just felt bleak, dead, out of touch almost, like a tree in the dead of winter.

He was numb to anything and everything that wasn't this excruciatingly painful sense of emptiness and a deafening silence of the soul.

His family, of course, had been conscious of his struggle.

His wife was constantly trying to no avail to distract him, always trying to get him out of the house or shoving some shiny new thing in his face. His children always had some new game they wanted to play with him, or something they wanted him to watch with them. It always seemed as if there was so much to be done, but he only ever had the energy to do the same cyclical bullshit he did every other day.

He didn't want to say that he didn't appreciate their efforts, because the efforts were, although not necessarily efficacious, very real. He appreciated the fact that his family was trying to help him and had genuine concern for his well-being.

But something about it all just seemed to make him feel even worse.

So naturally, when he heard the front door click open at a time that it usually did not- a time that was usually strictly for wallowing in emotion or a surprising lack thereof- he knew things were about to get...interesting.

Closing his eyes, he sighed and shook his head in apprehension.

He wasn't exactly in the mood to deal with anyone at that moment.

"MIKE!" his wife called from the front of the house, "Mike, come here, I wanna show you something!"

Mike lolled his head back and closed his eyes, sighing.

"What now," he whispered to himself as he forced himself off the couch, hurrying to put on a very fake happy face for his wife.

"Coming!" he called back, feigning the lightheartedness in his voice as he hurried over to the kitchen.

Walking through the threshold of the kitchen, he found his wife sprawling pictures out over the countertop, a huge smile on her face.

Mike swallowed hard. He'd just about had it with looking at pictures recently and really wasn't up for making a distraction out of them at the moment.