Emperor of Mayhem

f o r t y - n i n e

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SONS OF ADAM
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If somewhere between the quickly blurring lines I didn't miscalculate, and by miscalculate I meant, if I didn't miss a few days while devotedly counting, I would say today marked it exactly one week since Mikhail left for Yemen, seven days since I last saw him, 168 hours since I last heard his voice slither through my skin.

10080 minutes since I heard my name from his mouth. 

He neither called nor texted me. I let it slide the first day because though, I didn't have any memory of me ever travelling across the world before, I knew sitting on a private jet for eights hours or even more, and on arrival, running helter skelter to save a friend from rotting in jail would be exhausting. I justified his thoughtlessness as him dealing with too much at that moment and instead, made myself the bigger person and left him a text asking if he arrived safely.

That night I went to sleep—though I could hardly call tossing around on the very comfortable bed, finding no position comfortable enough and staring at the white ceiling, only dozing off when my alarm was a few minutes from going off—a good sleep. 

I didn't sleep. 

I kept checking my cell phone for his reply. Knowing there was a time difference, I kept justifying his silence as 'he could be sleeping. Maybe Yemenis, including their visitors, weren't allowed to use cell phones at night.

My classes the following day were basically a joke because the only thing sitting down in the classrooms was my body. My soul, heart and mind was with him. I would stare at my phone for the longest while, hoping a text would pop, hoping he would feel that I was waiting for him to speak to me and call but...nothing.

I called countlessly and he wouldn't pick the call. The only thing that stopped me from developing a panic attack that something might have happened to him was that unlike me, he actually does call Riccardo. I knew this because Riccardo would always come up to my room to check up on me and look around the room for any threats, then tell me Mikhail is okay and he would leave. It was obviously him that sent the lad.

Yesterday night, I was standing by the window, staring at the pale moon, hoping wherever he was, he was staring and thinking about me too when I overhead Doyle, the dark-skinned soldier stationed by our window, speaking to him.

He could pick up a phone and call his soldiers and even his nephew but I wasn't worth it? What did I do? I would call and he wouldn't pick, text and he wouldn't even reply to it, leave a voicemail and he wouldn't open it.

It was as though he wasn't thinking about me at all. As if my thought never for once crossed his mind. Like crossing the border to Yemen erased my memory. I was here, failing an English quiz because I couldn't concentrate in class, allowing him to take over my sanity and yet, he felt nothing, no instinct to pick a phone and leave even a single-line text or a voicemail telling me he was busy?

He could tell me he was busy and I wouldn't even be offended as far as I'd heard his voice and was sure he remembered me, his little dreamcatcher.

But he did none of those. It was as if he didn't love me at all.

And this sordid reality had left this churning ache in my chest, a hollow I couldn't pinpoint where it was so I could fill it up with happy thoughts or something. 

"Azania?"

And because I was an overthinker, thanks to some of the heroines in my books, I had cooked a thousand possible reasons why he refused to speak to me in my head.