Lopsided

The room was lopsided. It had been since she emptied the last of her closet. Its size and capacity had always been a point of contention. Tom had never understood it. All he needed was a single drawer, maybe two at a push. 

In fairness, it wasn’t the closet that ended things, at least not the only thing. It had been death by a thousand cuts. Their relationship had started with an intensity that was uncomfortable to be around. The sickening type of couple, making everyone else in the room feel inferior about their love life. Now they were a Halloween display at high noon, all of the magic and mystery lost in the full light of day. It was really no one’s fault, at least that was the lie they both repeated to one another in an attempt to keep things civil. 

And now the room was lopsided. Perhaps it always had been.  

While the feeling was certainly an emotional one, as Tom sat on the edge of the bed they once shared, he couldn’t help but feel the room was in fact, actually off-kilter. 

Their apartment had been rocked by several small earthquakes (that the fracking companies swore had nothing to do with them) and while there was no visible damage, perhaps there were in fact some unseen effects. He had never noticed it before, perhaps because she had been a distraction, with all the laughing and fucking (in the good times) and all the fighting and crying (in the bad and most recent times). It was like the foundation was off by half an inch, maybe even less, and while the sensation of being off-balance was slight, the effect seemed to be cumulative, a steady and unnerving energy building up in Tom’s spine. 

He went to the hallway closet and grabbed his toolbox, something his girlfriend had begged him to use on a myriad of small and truly insignificant improvements. They would have been quick and easy fixes, why had he not just done them?

Because she was being a bitch about it, Tom reassured himself. 

He grabbed the bubble level and placed it on the floor. Perfectly even. 

That couldn’t be right. He moved it to another corner of the room. Same result. 

This process continued for the next two hours, Tom checking and rechecking every square inch of his new bachelor pad. Could the level itself be faulty? This seemed unlikely, but he went and asked the neighbor to borrow theirs just in case. 

After a lengthy and thorough reevaluation with the borrowed tool, the results were unchanged. It was maddening. The data said one thing and his gut said another. Something was absolutely off. 

He scoured the internet, diving down a deep rabbit hole of amateur DIY experts and the occasional cat video. The cats did nothing for him and the amateur handyman only frustrated him further. 

That’s when it hit him. Maybe his equilibrium problem wasn’t with the foundation or floors at all. Certainly, if there had been an issue there, his now EX would have found a way to complain about it. 

Maybe the problem was him.

He jumped on WebMD and it took all of three seconds to confirm he was in deep trouble, the only question remaining being just how deep. There were the typical favorites, brain tumors, both benign and cancerous, a less sexy nervous system disorder, and a run of the mill panic attack. While this last one was the most likely scenario given all the circumstances, the one that really caught Tom’s eye, was an incredibly rare infection typically transferred by a species of fly native to South East Asia. Now, while Tom didn’t consider himself a racist, there was that Asian couple in B7 that always was cooking strange and potent smelling foods. Perhaps one of their exotic meats or produce had carried some of that fly’s larvae, only to hatch and end up buzzing around the rest of the building, ultimately landing Tom with a virus that this very moment was building up fluid in his inner ear and causing him to feel unbalanced? 

The fact that the couple were from Kansas and were every bit as American as he was, or that the strange food smells were actually Greek takeout with not even the slightest chance of having come into contact with the infamous insect, were truths that Tom neither knew nor probably would have cared about at that point. He could feel the deadly puss building pressure and needed to do something about it. He would finally be a man of action. If only his girlfriend had been here to see it…

From what he could read, in severe cases (which is clearly what he was) patients had to have the fluid drained from the ear canal with a syringe. While going to the hospital may have seemed like the clear choice, Tom’s lack of insurance coupled with the manic energy pouring through his veins, led him to the point he now found himself, holding a fine-tipped Phillips head screwdriver over a Bic lighter to sterilize it. As the flames blackened the steel, he wondered what she was doing right now. 

Sure, she had driven him crazy (more than he even now realized), but a woman like that wouldn’t stay single for long. She had the looks that turned heads, but the reason you couldn’t look away was deeper. She was the answer to the riddle. Nothing made sense before her, and it made even less sense now that she was gone. 

As Tom slid the red hot screwdriver deep into his ear canal, simultaneously puncturing and melting the membrane of his eardrum, the waves of pain scorching through every inch of him mixed together with something else… relief. While the emergency room doctor would soon tell him that he did not have the nearly impossible to contract disease and that his hearing loss could well be permanent, in this moment everything was crystal clear. 

It was simple. She was right, and he was wrong. Things had always been lopsided. 

And as soon as his ear stopped bleeding, he would tell her.