"Anonymous"

For those of you that don't know, LineByLine is a prompt-based online writing community.  The prompt phrase must appear in it's entirety somewhere in the piece.  This week's phrase is 'long before now'. 

This piece is entitled, "Anonymous". 

The chair is hard under his butt and the smell of magic marker is making him sick.  He regrets putting the name tag so far up his shirt; if he had put it on his pocket, or waited for the marker to dry before sticking it on, he wouldn’t be getting high from fumes.  Better yet, he should have stuck it to his sweatshirt instead.  That way he could pretend to be too warm, remove the sweatshirt, and suddenly become the Man Without A Name.  No one would ever call on the Man Without A Name.  No one would ever ask him to answer questions or try to engage him in awkward conversation.

His cousin had advised him to write a fake name, and he berated himself that he hadn’t remembered the advice until after he had written his own on the name tag.  He couldn’t very well throw the name tag away and make a new one; everyone would have seen him write a different name on the second tag, and then everyone would know that he was a great, big phony.

Was he a great, big phony?  Robert wasn’t sure.  He felt like the fact that he had agreed to come proved that he wasn’t, proved that he understood that it was time to take action and change his life.  Be he, of course, didn’t think his life needed changing; it had been his friends and family that though his life needed changing.  From Robert’s perspective, he was fine.  Did being at the meeting when he didn’t feel like he needed to be there make him a phony?

Maybe he should have risked throwing out the name tag and making a fake one, after all.

Of course, no one in the room would even know that the name on his tag was really his.  They were probably already assuming that he was using a fake name, so it didn’t really matter that he had written his own.  Robert was a common enough name; they would probably think that he had come up with it off the top of his head. 

But if he DID decide to stick with it, the graduation certificate with his real name on it – ‘Robert has successfully completed blah blah blah’ – would be infinitely sweeter than one with a pseudonym written on it.  If he were to go to his wife’s mother’s house with a certificate with someone else’s name on it, his mother-in-law would probably assume that he had mugged some unsuspecting sap and stolen his diploma rather than sit through all the sessions.

He sneers. 

His mother-in-law.  He had never really liked her.  But if there was one thing he had to give to the old bat, it was that she had birthed a wonderful woman.  Laura had agreed to marry Robert against her mother’s advice, and Robert had only imagined the sadistic glee that she had rubbed in Laura’s face when the fights started.  Robert couldn’t understand how such an even-tempered, well-intentioned woman could have descended from such a vindictive old crone.

Any other woman would have followed her mother’s advice and left Robert outright.  Not Laura.  But, despite her indomitable patience, she still had her limits.  It had been days since she had given him the ultimatum and gone to her mother’s house.  He had only talked to her once since then, and he was given explicit instructions not to call her until he pulled his butt from the hard plastic chair at the end of the two hours.  And every two hour session after that.

As the depression sets in again, Robert suddenly doesn’t feel so much like a phony anymore, at least by his definition.  His friends were right, and his family was right, and Laura was right.  This was where he belonged, and he knew it.  The true irony was that the onset of his depressions usually caused what got him in this hard plastic chair in the first place; but since he had actually dragged himself to the first meeting, his usual panacea wasn’t within arm’s reach.  It was something he wished he had done long before now. 

When he shakes himself from his daydream, Robert finds every eye in the room on him.  He had been so absorbed with his thoughts that he hadn’t noticed that it was his turn for introductions.  So he stands, straightens his shirt, inhales deeply (taking in another lungful of magic-marker-laced air) and says, “Hi.  My name is Robert, and I am an alcoholic.”