When the phone rings, its sound slices right through the 3AM peace of my hotel room like the shrill cry of a newborn in a hospital ward. And I seem to be ready for it, as I always am these days, even in my increasingly fleeting bits of sleep. I don’t need to rub my eyes, I don’t need a moment to compose myself; I know it’s you. I know your jetlag is keeping you up again and I’m happy because it has made you dial my number, something I wished you had done hours ago before I went to bed.

I hear your voice on the other end as you tell me that you wrote a poem that you want me to read. So we hang up and I look it up on my phone. Almost instantly, I slip into that now permanent sense of imbalance. My heart palpitates, as it always seems to do these days. I am back to that moment when you told me that you spent the night in someone else’s bed. Your verse romanticizes the night you spent alternating between the high of the joint he rolled and the warmth of the stories he probably told you between kisses. I know nothing about that place but in my head, I have constructed that night a thousand times. Did you not think of me before you put your phone on silent mode and escaped into him? Or was it the thought of me that made you do that? Neither of those thoughts is more comforting than the other. A part of me protests that I don’t deserve to feel this way; that it wasn’t a fair return for a night that I had spent looking at your pictures and trying to reach you – trying desperately to make sure you were safe in that foreign land. Another part of me dismisses that notion, arguing that fairness held no currency because you had never promised me anything.

I think back to the words of a friend, “you think you are in control, you think you will manage it all by yourself, but you can’t. That’s just how depression works.” Maybe I should have kept my appointment with my counselor that night instead of telling myself that I would be okay without her. Half-remarkable phrases that I had laughed off in the past now start haunting me. “Karma will catch up with you,” one lover had said between sobs. “You don’t abandon the ones you love,” another one had reasoned. “Why did you just drift apart,” a third one had once asked. Until a few nights ago, those had been mere breakup conversations. And now, they seemed to carry the sharpness of a blade that had been sharpened for a long time in its wait for a battle.

I check the time and realize that I have been up for an hour now. ‘And you say you are jet-lagged,’ I proclaim loudly and chuckle.  There is no defence against the night if you can’t sleep. It finds you at your softest and keeps working you till you break. I wonder if I should have left my phone on silent mode like you did that night with your temporary lover. Then I baulk at that phrase – t e m p o r a r y   l o v e r – because it occurs to me that I am one too. For you like finding lovers in every place you go to. But I am a man of constants. I need threads to hold me from falling apart. And in this moment, far away from home, I only have two. So I reach for my laptop and light up a cigarette. On nights like these, things that could kill end up saving you.