Awake, for Better or Worse

The room is dark and the fan is on. My eyes ache and Elle is a few inches or maybe miles from me. The room is dark and the fan is on and my hands are shaking and my blood is crashing through my veins and brain and heart and my lungs struggle to pull in


any






thing.





Panic. A static and stomping fills my ears and thoughts. I am scared. Paralyzed. Images of my body. Images of my mistakes. Echoes and ghosts and futures and the past. The fucking past seared into my face and every time you look at me isn't it all you see? Isn't it all I can see anyway?

Face after face after face, all lost. Eroded away by the constant tectonic alcoholic. The head of household. The good man. The hope and then, of course, the truth of it all.

It takes a half hour to pull myself together enough to get out of bed. To look at the shape of Elle under the blanket, sleeping it off. Breathing slow and steady, at peace. The things I've said. Done. Been. It's all I feel anymore and when I stopped drinking it came flooding in and I couldn't hide. I spent weeks at the edge. Making up for lost time, I imagined, and if I could only make peace with it, with it all but



why should I get off that easy?




Don't I deserve each moment like this? Each moment I have attacked you all with? Why should I accept it and move forward? No, I deserve this. This and more.

The shape of Elle under the blanket. Peaceful. Here because she loves me or here because we came here alone and together and I deserve that uncertainty. That paranoia. It will never matter what she says or does, I deserve to feel like I have to fight for her.

I stand and walk through the dark and I try not to choke against my collapsing lungs or let the dizziness take me to the floor and I reach the wall and lean and take my notebook from my backpack near it and go into the bathroom. I sit in the bathtub and I can choke there. I do.


Choke. Rest my head against the wall and let it all wash through me and over me.


I've been taking melatonin again. Nearly nightly and I took two last night and slept restlessly and I took two tonight and it is now almost five and I am drowning in panic. I have been here so often in the past and I know soon I'll be drinking Nyquil by the bottle and soon I'll be back on the fucking Seroquel that hollowed me out but I slept. I slept well and my real self didn't wake up then until I took myself off.

My breathing slows and I count my fingers slow against my thumbs.


One, two, three, four.


Four, three, two, one. Over and over.


This isn't even the worst part of sobering up. It's not facing what you've done. Or making amends. Or making the change completely. It isn't the way your chemistry reacts without alcohol. No.


It's realizing that so many parts of me weren't created by alcohol. They were just me. The panic. The rage. The sadness. The paranoia. I'm quick to react, judge, damn. I can be mean to people I love without a second thought. I can be cold and cruel for no other reason than because I am capable of it.

I forgot all of that shit lived in me and in the decade I was an alcoholic and the half decade before it that I was building steadily up to it, I forgot that those were parts of me.

I forgot that I was awful.

Always this picture of a good man that Elle had never met. Had been buried under a disease. A good man that was still somewhere if I could only pick him out slow and carefully.

I had forgotten what I was. What I am.

I sit in the bathtub and count my fingers and control my breaths and I can feel my heart slow eventually and I stand and take two more melatonin and wash it down drinking from the faucet. My face in the mirror. Red and swollen and the fucking past seared into it and I wonder if I have ever been happy, like I remember I was. I wonder if any of the light ever really shone and I wonder if I was so fucking happy before, why'd I drink so much?

Why'd I quit?


In the mirror he tries to feed my argument but I know why.

For Elle. For hope. For my family, and for me. The me I thought I was and the me I want to be again, for the first time.


A few more deep breaths.


Another drink of water.


Another farewell to the scarred and swollen reflection and I walk into the dark bedroom where Elle hasn't stirred and I slide in next to her, ashamed and in love and awake, for better or worse.