Searching for a Solution

I

It was another long night at the lab. Maxwell Donnigan had been up since seven that morning, and though it was now in the early hours of the next day, he had no intention of sleeping any time soon. He'd been looking at sample after sample for the past five years, always trying to find it. The cure.

Maxwell had never considered himself to be particularly social in the first place, so perhaps it was fitting that he'd ended up in a biological illness research lab in his mid-30s. As a child, his older brother had always picked on him for being an antisocial nerd. He hadn't had many friends in the first place, so maybe ending up alone in life was where fate wanted to place him. 'Well, nearly alone,' Max reminded himself, placing yet another sample under his microscope and adding a reacting agent. After all, he wouldn't even be in this field if it wasn't for her.

He'd met Liliana in his early years of college. He'd been a freshman with absolutely no idea what he wanted to do in life. The only thing he really knew was that if he didn't live up to his brother's standard of perfection, his parents were sure to look down on him. But when he met her, suddenly something pulled him to where he was meant to be. Be it fate or cruel punishment, Maxwell Donnigan had finished off his college degree and set his mind on curing what had become a daily struggle for Liliana.

And so, on this ungodly hour on a Tuesday morning, Max was still plugging away, alternating between testing samples, jotting messy notes in his now heavily worn work notebook, and releasing a fair amount of curses when, yet again, things didn't work out as he thought they would.

His phone sounded with another notification noise, almost sighing at him as if fed up with his ongoing antics. Max absentmindedly glanced at it, skimming over the text from Liliana that read, 'When will you be home?' Somewhere in his mind, he was aware of his increasingly late nights and his slightly shorter than normal fuse due to lack of sleep, but at the same time, the dominant part of him pushed on with a focused mindset: find the cure. He sighed and pushed up the glasses that were again slipping down the bridge of his narrow nose, deciding at last that maybe he'd better give it up for the night.

Maxwell methodically packed up his things into his messenger bag and pulled on his long coat as he glanced around the empty lab one last time before heading toward the door. There were still the shards of a glass test tube on the floor from when he had got too frustrated earlier, but he supposed that it wasn't really going anywhere and could wait until his return to be swept up. He clicked off the lights, bathing the rows of tables in darkness, and made his way out to his car before driving home to his fiancee in the still-dark early morning hours.

As he pulled up to their shared apartment, Max felt a familiar feeling course through him. Here he was, coming back again, with no good news. After all his work, was there nothing to show for it? He quietly made his way up the stairs and put his key in the lock, starting to feel his true fatigue. He toed his shoes off by their welcome mat, a brightly colored thing that Liliana had picked up at one of the craft fairs after selling some of her latest paintings. 'You can do anything you put your mind to' it read, which always made Max consider the irony.

It used to be something that he'd believed. He'd lived and breathed the phrase before they'd even owned the rug itself. Now though, he simply wondered if it could even happen at all. He climbed into bed quietly next to Lilianna's thin form, and she smiled at him sleepily in the dimly lit room as she ran her fingers through his dark hair.

"Hey," she whispered, "you've been gone a while." He nodded, avoiding the question she really asked with her eyes, "Why won't you take care of yourself too?" She snuggled close to his chest and instead, they turned the topic to anything other than what they should've been talking about. They discussed her latest artwork, the museum they were planning to visit next weekend, and the time she'd fallen into a fountain while Max was trying to get the perfect picture of her. 

After several hours of talking, she fell asleep on his chest. Max himself, however, was still wide awake, staring at the ceiling running solutions through his brain until he finally dozed off.