It was mid-afternoon, and unseasonably cool, and the fresh air that surrounded the bay-windowed area where he sat gave him a welcome, invisible caress.  He closed his eyes and sat back, fully, until all he could see was the popcorn-afflicted whiteness of his ceiling.

This particular Sunday had begun as a day of what he had redefined as his personal Sabbath: doing absolutely nothing that he did not want to do.  And so it had begun; for his first few waking hours, nothing but the inane sounds of another season of _Deadliest Catch_ filled the space in his apartment, and nothing but happily un-analytical absorption of images bereft of any meaning whatsoever had occupied his fields of vision and of thought.

But his computer, left on from the previous night, remained on his table, partly open, a faint glow from its mostly-concealed screen serving as either a warning or an invitation.  An invitation, of course, from himself — from the masochistic cluster of neurons that persuaded him to not simply close the goddamn thing and put it into its case, and that maintained a steady hum despite his best efforts to not-think; not-engage, not-care.

He stared at the ceiling a little while longer, thinking of how much the “popcorn” finish resembled meringue, and wishing that he had not eaten the last half of the pie that his girlfriend had given him the day before, between the hours of two and three that morning.

“You eat your emotions anyway,” she had said, slyly, when handing it to him.  “Add lemon curd!  You’ll forget how much they can suck.”

He was thankful for her.  His last foray into online dating, begun in borderline cynical resignation, had just begun its descent into what he felt right now — what the fuck exactly do I hope to get out of this? — when he had come across her profile.   And despite his somewhat ironic realization that at that moment, every important dimension of his life was one that either relied on, or began its arc in, a computer, he had pressed the “Send” button that set the wheels of Change — most unexpected — spinning madly.

She had worried about him; worried about his health, and, unspokenly, about this current intrusion into it.  He had been careful about what he had shared with her — knowing when to be “open” was not among his most well-honed skills — but took comfort in her presence, even its remnant in the form of the scent of her shampoo on his pillow after she had gone home.

He would see her later.  And in the interim, he had time.

He pushed the laptop’s cover open, and the screen greeted him with the white glow of the email page that he had left open.

You seem to have developed a real need to demonize Greta, just as you did your mother 24 years ago. Is it because you have now reconnected with Frances, and need to justify yourself to her? Let me be perfectly clear: I agree with Greta 100% and always have regarding the guidance she tried to give you. In addition, I am appalled that you would refer to her the way you do after all she did and tried to do for you. You have no right to build a personal history where you take incidents out of context and conveniently string them together for your purposes. This is what Frances used to do, and I see you are now following the same pattern.

He sat, his hands folded underneath his chin.  The cat stirred and blinked at him, and walked off in search of food, or the disposal thereof.