The Phantom Currency

She is in some serious trouble.

Something heavy and suffocating is sitting just outside the frame, and it rings. It rings, and the entire temperature of the room drops by ten degrees.

She keeps getting these phone calls. The screen lights up, she answers it, and I can literally watch the blood drain from her face. She turns completely away from me, her voice dropping into a tense, desperate hiss, and when she hangs up, she is gone. Physically, her body is still sitting on the edge of my bed, but her actual self has packed up and evacuated the building. She becomes entirely withdrawn. A block of ice. Sad, worried, and freezing cold to talk to.

I sit there, practically vibrating with neurotic curiosity, my mind spinning into dark, frantic spirals. Who the hell is on the other end of that invisible wire? Debt collectors? A loan shark sharpening a knife? Abusers? Her mother? A vicious husband I know absolutely nothing about? Who knows? I certainly don’t know, because I am too much of a coward to demand an answer.

It is profoundly bothering me. It is a persistent, gnawing rot in the back of my skull.

Not because I have some heroic, white-knight complex where I want to save her. No. It bothers me because those calls dictate the exact atmospheric pressure of my own damn life. If the call happens, the day is immediately, irrecoverably ruined. Every single thing we do—every word spoken, every meal eaten, every breath taken in this suffocating apartment—is dictated entirely by the phantom currency of her mood. And those calls bankrupt her mood the second they connect.

I am suddenly realizing that I am no longer holding the pen. My entire psychological state is now tethered to how a stranger reacts to a ringing phone.