Gradual Cooling

Richard suddenly awakened. He hadn’t been dreaming, just a blank sleep, from which he abruptly arose, as if he had been electrocuted. He looked at the clock—3:00AM-- and after his initial shock began to subside, settled into a resigned bout of half-wakefulness, which he knew would last at least an hour, before he would submerge again into the dark blankness of a full sleep.

His mind turned to thoughts of Lola, but not as you might imagine a man might think in the early morning hours about his lover, but rather, he began to worry, to brood, about how Lola never called him. Then he thought ‘She never invites me over to her house anymore; I have to invite myself.” His anxiousness deepened as he further agonized, ‘She rarely kisses me anymore, either.’

Richard began to fear if, in fact, there wasn’t something “wrong” between he and Lola, or if he was just irrationally imagining some change in the ‘temperature’ of their relationship, a gradual cooling which he feared was really more than a mere cooling, more like an un-recognized chilling in their formerly searing love?