"My mother was doing that thing she did. That thing with the rag in the sink."
"What thing?" Christie finally looked up from her phone and frowned in confusion. So she had been listening.
"You don't remember? I know I've told you about it before. Whenever she would get anxious about something, she would find something, anything, to clean and she would do so furiously. It was the only way she knew how to cope with it. On that day, it was cleaning the kitchen sink. She had grabbed her cleaning rag and scrubbed furiously for nearly an hour."
"That seems like a rather silly way to unwind," Christie commented, turning back to her phone. "Why not just watch a movie or something and relax?"
And there it was. He had tried, so many times, to explain it so that Christie could understand, but she just couldn't grasp it. It was true that Christie lacked a certain degree of empathy, but it was also next to impossible to get her to understand the crippling weight of an anxiety attack simply because she had never experienced one.
"You can't relax, Christie. That's what I keep trying to tell you. I don't have it as bad as my mom did, but when you start to feel anxious your body just... It's like you can't focus on anything but that feeling, that feeling that you need to escape from some imagined monster that's stalking your every move. And cleaning was mom's way of keeping that monster at bay while she worked off the panic-fueled adrenaline in her system."
"The plane was two hours late."
"What?" He looked at Christie, slightly confused.
"I think I remember you telling me something about this before. She was worked up because your dad's plane was two hours late, right?" she said, still tapping away at her phone.
He frowned slightly, glaring at her phone. He had grown to loathe that phone during their brief romance two years ago. She couldn't seem to put it down for more than a few minutes at a time, not even here at the café, and she defended its use by promising that it didn't interfere with her conversations.
"Yeah, that's right," he confirmed. "Dad was late coming in from his business trip and mom was worried. She worried a lot about him when he traveled. Then again, we didn't have cell phones back then. Or the internet, for that matter. She couldn't just track his flight or send him a quick text message to see if he was okay."
"That's why I love cell phones," she said, briefly looking up at him. "Everything you could want to know is right in the palm of your hand! It's so much more convenient than when we were kids."
Everything except the little details, he thought. They had spent two years together and she never once noticed the way he writes with both his left and right hand. He had mentioned his ambidexterity during one of their coffee outings last year and she had been completely surprised by it.
"Anyway," he continued, turning toward the cafe window and watching the passers-by, "she was scrubbing away at that sink when suddenly my dad walks in with this huge bouquet of flowers and a little pink box with a red bow on top. Mom was floored and didn't know whether she should hug him or yell at him because his flight wasn't supposed to be on the ground yet."
"If his plane was still supposed to be in the air, then why was he home?" Christie asked.
"Well, once he found out about the delay with his flight, he rented a car and drove home. It was their anniversary and he wanted to get home as soon as he could."
"Seems like a hassle to me," she said, typing furiously. "Should've just waited for the flight. The rental cost him more money and only saved him an hour of wait."
He sighed and fell silent, watching the steady stream of pedestrians. It was during these meetings with Christie that he realized what he wanted in his life and how he still clung, stubbornly, to the relationship he and Christie once had.
He eyed Christie as she stared at her phone and sighed again. Perhaps today would finally be the day that he cut ties with his past and invested more into finding his future.
The prompts for this weekend freewrite were provided by @mariannewest. You can find the 3 prompts at the following links: the first sentence, the interference, and the dramatic twist.
