Is he listening?

It’s half-nine on a Sunday evening and your brain starts resetting itself to: work tomorrow. You’re free-falling through the Sky until you land on top of a Frasier rerun.

You discover its three episodes back-to-back. You hope there’s one before Niles and Daphne got together, because they were more believable then.

You laugh along with the canned studio audience, try to ignore the time you’re wasting watching an episode you have actually seen one hundred times before, but continue to watch, because it makes you feel better, even in small doses.

Soon, it’s eleven o’ clock and you missed the BBC News - it usually annoys you anyway.

You shut down for the night and lie in bed, re-living that Niles joke, because, quite frankly, Frasier would not be Frasier without Niles.

You wish you could go back to when it was still on every Friday night, before the pub became an option. Seeing it as you are now, so you can appreciate the jokes, because you’re fucking older.

You replay one of the episodes in your head; the one where Niles is almost free of Maris but has to move into a dive, the Shangri La. And you well-up, because you’re on your period.

Because you know you have destroyed what little remained, and you finally delete his number.

There is nothing left to do but wait until your mind tires itself out, so that you can fall asleep.

You forget all about Frasier – you just try to forget.