Sophie.

“The asshole is stalling out sending the alimony checks, can you believe that shit?”

“Sounds ridiculous.”

“I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do, I'm going to be late for rent again.”

“...you could get a job.” There was awkward silence between Sophie and her friend.

“I might have to, but raising this child is hard.” It wasn't. Sophie did not raise her child so there was nothing hard about it. It was also more poignant that Sophie's friend had five and still worked.

“...I guess.” her friend said over the phone.

“That fucking asshole is just making my life harder because he can.” she took a drink out of a can Keystone sitting on the kitchen table, one of several dozen. From today. “He's not content being out of my life yet so he still wants to ruin it for me and the kid.”

“Well you knew he was an asshole for years, we all did.”

“Just a violent son-of-a-bitch never content with anything in his life.” Sophie wasn't wrong. Her ex-husband was a violent son of a bitch who was never content with his life. She just omitted the fact that several of the violent confrontations between her and her ex-husband were often instigated or started by her.

Like when one night while drinking she was watching 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' and her child watched her awkwardly stumble up and into the kitchen, grabbed a wooden spoon and went into the bedroom to beat the hell out of her ex-husband in his sleep. She could not remember why she was upset at him, but the devil avoided the details and she was running on feelings and liquor and she was certain that she must've been brooding on the couch and upset at him for a pretty good reason. And that was a common thread in most of the confrontations with her emotionally demeaning husband who rightfully observed she was a loser despite very much being a loser himself. They were both loser parents who sought to blame each other for their own shortcomings which led to them in fact aggravating each other's shortcomings further. Nobody else existed in the world except each other to pin all the evils and hate in the world on. Except her child. The child sort of existed probably. The child was at least useful for leverage against the opposing parent. The likelihood of them growing up to be a loser just like Sophie and her ex-husband was high, because that's what institutionalized poverty and an abusive household did to a child. The odds of getting out and making something of one's self was low, because even if given the opportunity to get out, their upbringing would not give them the ability to recognize it and their upbringing would not grace them with the work ethic and tenacity to work through it. The child was to be embittered by the world at this point, and lapse back to the present and a slew of batterings later, Sophie was at home drunk at 11am, wondering where it all went wrong.

“I just don't know where it all went wrong.” she said on the phone. Sophie did but was in denial. Her pride and inability to blame herself for anything gave her a myopic view on her circumstances. Her ex-husband was clearly to blame for her lack of money, not her inability to hold down a job. Her and her child going hungry was because of the lack of money, not her unwillingness to leave the house and go shopping unless it was to the liquor store down the street for more cheap beer. The animosity between her and her child was because her ex-husband was clearly manipulating them against her, not because of the horrible circumstances her child was put into watching their mother become increasingly more apathetic and self-destructive. Sophie was not the ideal role model for her child and she was certainly not a good mother, but she convinced herself that everything she pretended she was doing was for her child probably sort of.

“I have to go to work, so I'll talk to you later, Sophie.” her friend said.

“Okay.” And with that, Sophie hung up. She slowly slouched into her chair at the kitchen table, consciousness coming and going as it pleased. She didn't know whether or not she wanted it to stay, so she drank more to find out. Her grip was surprisingly steady, as it needed to be because there were so many cans on the table that knocking one over would lead to them spilling onto the floor again. Of course it didn't matter if they were on the floor anyway, unless there was still beer in any of them that she hadn't finished yet.

She had hoped that drinking her problems away would work. It didn't. She had also hoped that lying and manipulating the situation around her and skewing the information she relayed to her family would make her problems go away. It also didn't. Sophie wanted to leave all her problems behind or drive them off, but problems were frequently as stubborn as the people they followed, and Sophie was stubborn. She was stubborn enough not to die despite ingesting enough cheap alcohol day in and day out that it would have a man twice her size setting the air ablaze if he tried to light a cigarette. Her alcoholism could not kill her, she was driven by a sobering hatred and an unyielding liver that she was more abusive to than her child.

It was a lot of hatred too. It was more intoxicating than the alcohol, and arguably was doing a better job of killing her than the alcohol as well. At this point in the divorce she seldom knew love or how it looked anymore, the hate drowned it. Hate was all she needed to drive her will to live. She was malnourished and frail, and yet the hate kept her alive and gave her strength. She had the strength to throw a potted plant across the room as if it was made of foam and almost beaned her child with it for asking why she didn't make dinner again. She hated her ex-husband for doing all of this to her. She hated being poor again after maxing out her ex-husband's credit cards. She hated whenever the child came home and couldn't look at her before quickly rushing upstairs out of shame. She hated waking up to an empty bed every afternoon despite having an asshole of an ex-husband, because being dependent on an asshole was the only way she knew how to live her life. But most importantly of all, she hated herself. She pretended she didn't, but she hated herself more than anything else. She hated herself because beyond the impenetrable wall of pride, the elaborate facade she's constructed for herself in front of her friends and family that were manipulated into knowing nothing was her fault, she knew everything was all her fault. But she still lied and manipulated people anyway because she had an idiot's pride. And it took all her concentration to keep her horrible self-esteem about being a loser in check by repressing and denying any fault she committed. It was a lot of energy, but hate gives a lot back. Everything she saw in her apartment reminded her of her ex-husband, which would make sense considering he bought mostly everything in it. The futon in the living room reminded her of whenever she kicked him out of the bedroom and he had to wake up at 12:30 in the morning to leave for work at 3am six days a week and hated him for always being tired. The table she was drinking at reminded her of all the times she didn't cook dinner and hated him for chewing her out for being so fucking lazy that she couldn't even do something as simple as preparing a meal for several hours for four very picky eaters. The lights that were on in the kitchen reminded her of the electricity bill he was still paying and she hated him for it because he knew as well as she did that she wasn't reliable enough to pay for it herself, and she wore sunglasses indoors in the afternoon out of spite but also to have something to hide herself behind. And even her child reminded her of her ex-husband as the lynchpin, the only reason she stayed married to the angry son-of-a-bitch. And occasionally she hated the child for what she felt was forced to endure.

Sophie's hateful reverie must've lasted hours before it ended when the garage door started opening. She hated that too because it was generally a sign that her ex-husband was home and ready to start a fight and it put her on edge, but she knew at this point that after she snapped back to reality several hours later, all these signs of hate in the real world more or less meant ultimately nothing but the weight she tied to them. The child came in through the door from the garage. They must've gotten off school. Remilia was behind the child pressing them into talking.

“Oh come on, Lucas. Tell me what happened. Please.” The child was ultimately unresponsive. Sophie had her sunglasses she wore indoors at 3 in the afternoon to hide behind, but she saw the child, arms bruised and face reddened. They were thin, malnourished almost as much as her.

“Tell me you're seeing this.” Remilia looked over at Sophie. She said nothing as the child avoided eye contact with both of them and stormed upstairs. “What no, don't be like this. We're worried.” Sophie said nothing and watched the child leave. The hiss of a beer can pierced the silence as she started to drink again.

“You ARE worried, right?” she asked Sophie, who continued to drink and said nothing. “You saw that child, they had the daylights beaten out of them again. Would it kill you to ask? To at least act like you're worried?” It sure felt like it would. Any expression of emotion would probably snap Sophie in half at this point. Remilia stood in the living room angled towards the stairs, but looking back at Sophie while her expression was a combination of being disheartened and frustrated.

“You can talk to everybody else but Lucas, huh? Is that because your own child knows too much already, that you can't lie your way through that conversation anymore and that they see right through that facade of being a good mom?” Sophie sighed and continued to drink. “Or is it because Lucas knows you can't be relied on for anything and won't even bother asking for help, even though that child desperately needs it? God knows you can't feed your child, let alone emotionally support them.” The alcohol was going dry as Remilia talked. “That child is going to be broken and it's going to be your fault from this point on. Does any of that matter to you at all?” It did, but not enough to do anything about it. “Do you really think you can keep this going? That you can wait it out and things will eventually fix themselves and go back to normal.” Sophie genuinely did. Is was an over-earnest, terrifyingly genuine belief that if she looked away long enough, everything would just sort itself out eventually. That she could get to a point where she could be happy. That despite her ex-husband being gone for good, he would come back and remain a convenient sticking point for all her problems.

“You won't ever be happy.” Remilia coldly interjected into her thoughts. “Your life may be Hell, but it's all you know. You won't do anything to try and make yourself happy because you don't know if you'll succeed. And you'd rather be miserable if it means blaming somebody else for it other than yourself.” Sophie stifled a whimper as she continued to drink. “I'm going to go talk to your child since they have nobody else. It won't work, but I'm at least gonna try.”

Sophie ran out of beer. As she attempted to sit up her knee clipped the table and the cans spilled onto the ground. She stumbled to the garage door and pulled her car keys off the key rack. When she went into the garage, she attempted to get the car key into the lock. She failed a few times before she got it in and twisted. She got into her car before realizing she forgot she left the key in the door lock, huffed and got back out of the car to retrieve it. As the automatic garage door opened, she turned on her headlights. The sun had set, it was past 7pm. She was still wearing her sunglasses. She began pulling her car out, strangely steady despite her clear intoxication. She was a better driver drunk than most people were sober. The liquor store was only three blocks away across the train tracks, but she was able to buy a 24-pack without a word and leave as quickly as she showed up. When she got home she almost slipped and fell in the kitchen. The lights were turned off when she left. She sneered and her anger surged for a bit before the apathy quelled it. She was too tired to drink at this point, it was 1am after all. She went upstairs and looked at her child's door. The light was off underneath the crack of the door and silence settled in the apartment. When she opened her door and crawled into her King-sized bed alone, it was 2am. Sophie wanted to call her friend or her mom to talk, but she figured she would do it when she woke up.