he checked his email.

Why am I doing this?

It had become a daily routine: check email for the latest salvo in a series of embittered, accusatory, passive-aggressive shots fired by his father and stepmother.  Read. Feel heart race.  Consider punching something.  Realize that the least injurious target is the wall, which would result in hours of patching and sanding, the better to avoid a pound of flesh carved from his security deposit, followed by somewhat fewer hours of regret, slight bleeding, and shame.  And with it, an additional layer of anger induced by knowing that, once again, he had allowed them to get to him, to poke red-hot forks into already tender metaphorical flesh, to exert their last gasp of control — Jesus, I’m 42 — from hundreds of miles away, through text on a screen that he could easily dismiss with a movement of his finger.

Fuck.

Had his therapist not “had to stop,” as went the official (and entirely reasonable, he had to admit; it being essential, after all, to honor that 21st-century-popularized concept of Boundaries) therapeutic coda to a session, he would have voiced this anger; sucked in the energy that threatened to send his arm rocketing into rented property; put into coherent words that were not shouted, not screamed, their primal energy momentarily subdued by the better angels of his analytical nature.

But he did have to stop, and between that moment and the next start, he had to deal with this.  A game that he had already lost by clicking a hyperlink; seeing their names and title — “Double or Nothing” — that made avoidance impossible.

Double or nothing.  You sad, old bastard.

He got up, closing the lid of his laptop enough to keep it from his immediate view, but not enough to send it into its temporary “sleep” mode.  He walked to the door that led to his balcony, the tiny 10 x 5 foot rectangle that he had made his outdoor sanctuary, equipped with Adirondack chair and string lights because, who the hell was going to tell him it wasn’t his deck?  The deck had been sold, along with the house, the lawn, and the peacefully generic neighborhood around them, and now, his means of sitting and being soothed by breezes was more expedient.  He was about to leave, and then spun on his right heel, and went to his bar.

“I shall not ponder this unmedicated.”  He said this aloud, in his empty apartment, and found himself giggling almost uncontrollably.  Keep it the fuck together, his more adult impulse admonished.  His one cat looked at him and began meowing with its unmistakable Siamese yawp, and in his last permitted insane moment wondered what wisdom he was missing because he could not speak the language.