11 AM. Checkout time. I phoned the office and told them I'd be staying another day.

At $40 a night, the Time Inn wasn’t as cheap as I had hoped. The breakdown went like this: $20 per hour, $40 per day, $100 per week, $250 per month—and I was now two days in. Yesterday, I had $696 and now I had $585. The bar had cost $31 for four pitchers of beer and a microwave burrito, plus tips.

I wished I had to work. I hated being hungover on a day off. It ruined it. I know standard operating procedure for most people is to get all ripped when they have the next day off, but not me. I’d rather drag my ass in to work, looking and feeling like shit. My job sucks. I might as well, too.

I showered, shat, and shaved, wishing I had my own washcloths and towels. The motel ones were thinner, rougher. Alien. I went across the parking lot to the office and became broker. I got a paper while I was there so I could peruse all the nifty apartments I wouldn’t be able to afford. Back in my room, a new day bought, I paced around on the weird green carpet with my phone in my hand.

Should I call her? Ask her if I can have some towels? Should I tell her I’m sorry, say that I love her, beg her to let me come home? In my phone, her name was Sweetie. In hers, I was Hubby. That was just in our phones, though.

She answered after six rings. One more and it would have gone to voice mail. “Hello?” She sounded tired. I froze when I heard her voice and didn’t say anything. I could actually feel her becoming impatient through the phone. “Hello,” she said again. A statement.

"Hi. Listen, I’m going to need more than just my clothes."

"Why? Like what?"

"Like towels. And I want my pillows. Maybe some books."

"I don’t think so. Those things are ours. They belong in our house."

"Ours? There is no more ours. You packed my bags yourself. This is over."

"So what makes you think you get the towels then? Or the books? This is a trial separation, remember? We talked about this in January. God."

She was talking down to me. “This is over.,” I said. “It’s been over for a year, ever since it happened, and you know it.”

"Time apart will be good for us."

"Time apart? You packed my fucking bags!" I was yelling into the phone now, thinking, Why? Why did I call her? How can I miss something I hate so much?

"We talked about it in January with Dr. Gannon, remember? Back when you would still go? Remember? We just need some space."

"Space? What, are we fucking astronauts?"

She hung up and I was glad, even though I fucking hated the word ‘glad’. What a flaccid feckless fucking word. I couldn’t believe I had actually called her. What in God’s name was I thinking? I imagined her in my head, putting her vast collection of lotions into alphabetical order, and hated her. I imagined her with a stack of face creams that went clear to the ceiling, and hated her some more. I saw ten thousand little bottles of nail polish, in every color imaginable, being smashed to bits by an aluminum baseball bat.

Later, after my life is over and I can’t go on and I might as well slash my fucking wrists, I laid on the bed and noticed that my hangover wasn’t that bad. It was still there, below the surface, snorkeling in the turmoil, but it really wasn’t that bad at all.

Can you imagine a kid in the middle of this? I thought, and allowed myself the lie of thinking the miscarriage had been a good thing, a blessing even. It was just reverse thinking, though, like saying the waves on the water cause the wind or abnormal brain chemistry causes mental illness. Reverse thinking is an easy out, and there’s comfort in that. Human beings cannot tolerate meaninglessness. They will find meaning anywhere, absolutely anywhere, just to escape it.

I looked at my phone and saw that it was March 21st, the first day of Spring, and even though I didn’t want to, I still couldn’t smile.