Turn 5 of 12

Reply to Milo's text

You pick up the phone. The screen is warm from sitting face-down on the desk, and the text sits there in its blue bubble, waiting. *still up? can't sleep.* Three words and a question mark, the same shape of message Milo has been sending you for the better part of a year, always after midnight, always when the thinking has got bad enough that he needs a witness to not reaching for the cabinet. You know the cabinet. It is the one above the kettle in his flat, the one with the four bottles of spirits he keeps buying and pouring down the sink and replacing.

You type *yeah, here* and send it, because that is what you send. That is the contract. But your thumb hovers after, because the thing you want to type is *I can fix it* or *I had a version of you that was okay* or *there is a program on my computer that knows you're afraid of water*, and none of those are messages you can send to a man who is sitting awake at 2:21 a.m. trying not to drink. So you type *rough night?* instead, which is what you would have typed before any of this happened, which is the point.

The reply comes fast. *same as always. keep thinking about the sunday game, if I play shit again ben's going to drop me.* This is not about football. You know this. Milo knows you know this. The conversation is the one where he talks about football and you talk about football and neither of you mentions the four bottles above the kettle, because mentioning them is the thing that makes the not-drinking harder, not easier. You have been here before. You will be here again. The only difference is that twenty minutes ago, for a brief and clean interval, none of this existed — and you put it back.

You set the phone down on the desk, screen up this time, so you can see when he replies. The monitor glows behind it, rewrite.exe still open, Milo's record filling the screen with fields you cannot unsee. The QUIT_ATTEMPTS field reads 4. The DRINKS field reads heavily. Your own tab sits behind it, patient, the OBSERVED section waiting like a page you have dog-eared but not turned. The radiator ticks. The orange security light on the betting shop flickers. You have a best friend who is awake and struggling and does not know that you just gave him back the struggle, and you have a program that can edit anyone you know, and you have no undos left.

The phone buzzes again. *you ever think about how we're 27 and still playing sunday league like it matters* and you almost laugh, because no, you don't think about that, you think about the fact that there is a field in a database that says INSOMNIA_ROOT: Will not sleep while problems remain unsolved, and it is the most accurate thing anyone has ever written about you, and you did not write it. You type *it matters to ben apparently* and send it, and the blue tick appears, and the conversation continues in the way it always continues, small and steady and not enough, and you let it, because it is the only honest thing you have left.