No nice, happy-go-lucky phone call begins with this sentence:

Some­times one must put away their per­sonal pains to con­cen­trate on what's really impor­tant: the safety, secu­rity and com­fort of some­one they truly care about.

Yes­ter­day, the sanc­tity of the home of some­one I love was invari­ably destroyed. The home where she lives, sleeps, no longer as com­fort­able as she might like. Not even close. No longer a haven from the out­side world, a place that is safe. No more. At least, not like before.

I can't even express how much this angers me.

* * *

When Amy called yes­ter­day, I was at the store. For some rea­son, even though I nor­mally do the oppo­site, I left my cell phone in the car while I was shop­ping. When I got back out to the car and loaded my items into the back seat, I real­ized that she had called.

Now, nor­mally when Ames calls in the mid­dle of the day, it's to express some inter­est­ing lit­tle tid­bit that she found funny, or to regale me with tales of the exor­bi­tant amount of cash she dropped at the fab­ric store. The voice­mails are enter­tain­ing, and always make me laugh when I hear them.

Not this time.

And sud­denly, my heart just sank. I assumed the worst. Was some­one dead or hurt? Was it Heather? Oh God. No. Tell me, any­thing but that, please.

I couldn't dial the phone fast enough.

She was okay.

I looked into my shoes to see if I could find my heart any­where. Waste of time. It was nowhere to be found. I needed to talk to her, to make sure she was okay. I didn't know if I was pre­pared to do that, though. After all, we haven't spo­ken for weeks.

It wasn't much of a decision.

After a cou­ple of hours passed, I called. She was okay.

I was too. We talked about what hap­pened, how she was feel­ing. But what's impor­tant is that she was okay. I needed to know that she was okay.

We didn't really talk about "us" too much, though. God, I feel silly even typ­ing that, being as there really is no us. But we did talk about a few things, none of which really helped either of us.

I could lit­er­ally feel the sad­ness in her voice. Was she try­ing to con­vice me or herself?

* * *

I finally got to sleep at around five this morn­ing, thanks to noth­ing more than pure exhaus­tion. The mass amounts of alco­hol con­sumed last nite prob­a­bly helped a bit with this, but did noth­ing for how heavy my heart felt for the rest of the day and nite.

No rest for the hurting.

I awoke at 8:30am, with my thoughts pick­ing up right where they left off just over three hours previous.

Her.

I'm scared for her. She really didn't need this. She's hav­ing enough trou­ble with things. No one really deserves to be vio­lated in such a hor­ri­ble way.

And as a spe­cial note going out to the rat-fuck moth­er­fucker that hurt some­one I care about: Lis­ten, pal. Being as I have lit­tle faith in the Amer­i­can jus­tice sys­tem, I'm sure that if you do go to jail for this, you'll be out in almost no time. Can I con­trol this? No. Were I to be in charge, I would damn well find a way to make sure that you didn't make it out of prison alive. Be glad I'm not in charge, lest you resem­ble one of those blos­som­ing onion things you get at Chili's.

You don't hurt some­one I love. Period.

* * *

I hope that my call helped. I don't know if it did.

For that con­ver­sa­tion, my pain no longer mat­tered. Us didn't mat­ter. It was about some­thing much big­ger than that, being there for a friend that was hurt­ing. To that end, I hope that I was at least able to do that. I tried, and it's all I can do.