"At least when you were drinking you were fun! What have you got now? What are you going to do with yourself?" I keep hearing this over and over again as I lay awake at night. I can picture the confused look on her face when Erin, Queen of the Bar flies, called me last February. I had been gone for nearly a month and she had just noticed I was missing. "There are many things I want to do now, I'm thinking about going back to school." I promised to call her when I made it back to the city, but I knew wasn't going back. I couldn't go back there and be that person again. That fall she and I had been close in our misery spending many evenings lamenting our losses and doing our best to empty every bottle of liquor in the city in an ill guided attempt to locate them. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I answered back knowing very well what it was she meant. She'd seen me without the hazy shield of alcohol. She knew very well the anxious, nail biting, anti-social kid I really was and it was a sharp contrast to the fast talking smart ass occupying his normal seat in that Brighton bar cursing at a Baseball game. I was furious I could feel the terrible things I wanted to say to her welling up in my gut ready to pierce the very same hazy shield she was hiding behind. "I've got to run, I've got some things I've got to do...take care of yourself huh?". I hung up the phone and sat at my desk with my head in my hands for what could have been hours. What was I going to do with myself now? I guess I hadn't really gotten that far in this grand plan. My mind had been too occupied with the detoxing and the sickness and the wave of true real feeling that came over me in those first days of clarity. The feeling I got from the warmth of a pint had suddenly been ripped from me and I knew eventually I would have to find something or someone to fill that void.

You'll know it when it comes

It came to me with such force that I am certain it was fired from the muzzle of a rifle. All too suddenly the shaking in my hands stops. The alternating chills and sweats subsided and I found peace. Concerned that I was going to die I sat up and waited for it all to end and when it didn't come I was slightly let down. I remembered the pact I had made to myself that fall, "I will not see the other side of this winter". It was interesting in that for so long the only thought in my mind was how she had left me. How she was gone. For two years I had drank myself nearly to death almost weekly in order to stop the images of her with all those other men. Determined, I climbed out of bed and began to take stock of my life. I wasn't dead, and she wasn't going to kill me if this addiction couldn't. I had roughly 11 dollars to my name and with rent due in a month I did the only thing I knew how to do. I packed what I could carry in a bag and set out into the January night bound for home and to reunite with an estranged family.

When I was drinking I lost my words. As long as I can remember writing for me has been like breathing for most men. I need it simply to live and I have done it just as casually. How I managed to survive for those two years without breathing will forever remain a mystery to me. After all I had seen and all the darkness I had endured I was sure now that I would be able to craft my master piece. Two years later I'm not really sure what story I'm trying to tell.

Ali

"Can you meet me in 45?" Ali says. "Perfect!". I hear her phone hang up and am imediately filled with what I assume are butterflies. I spin the cap off of the half pint of Jack I keep tucked neatly in my desk drawer for just such an occasion and set the butterflies adrift in an ocean of whiskey. I can hear my heart racing in my ears, my head gets hot. I muffle my coughs struggling to keep the whiskey and assorted butterfly pieces in my stomach while I shower and dress.

Its there, why wont you take it?

It always comes at night startling me from sleep. It chokes me so violently that the corners of my vision are set upon with a creeping darkness. Everything is as I have always imagined it would be. She's gorgeous as she lay beside me, the flickering colors of the television make her appear an apparition. We are compatible in every sense of the word, yet for some reason I just can't connect to her. It always feels as though I am watching from a third person perspective. Observing my own life as it goes on with out me. I am unable to bend my own body underneath even the strongest urges to leap from this bed and run until every last fiber of my being has been exhausted and I simply vanish into the air.

On its own my body rises from the bed and exits the room into a dark hallway that seems to go on forever. A light in the distance is my objective, and in that light a table and on that table lies the remedy to this situation...whiskey. A long pull from the bottle sucks me back into my body, though I am still only a passenger. Two more pulls and it is back to the long dark hallway, moving back towards the bedroom door that is illuminated by the light of television.

Back into bed I softly climb as not to disturb her. I resolve to leave tomorrow as I have done every night for what seems like the last six months. I know I will not go but this act comforts me and I sleep. There are no dreams this night.

Something to expand on later

The room was glowing orange with the setting sun. Her delicate features were illuminated in this odd August light. There were no pretences of something lasting and certainly no overtones of love. She had come here with one goal, and one she would easily achieve. In my most shallow of moments I relented to her advances. We drank vodka straight from the bottle and we laughed as we recounted tales of our own short comings. Being able to bond with one who never lived up to their potential is a vastly underrated method of therapy. For one sunset neither of us were a let down.

Lunch With Frank

I leave my office everyday at twelve thirty and I meet a man named Frank at a small Italian lunch place a block away. Frank is a state worker and he's amazingly invested into current affairs. He has an opinion on every mid day news story and he's never afraid to share it with me. He's a single man in his forties, is overweight and gray with an amazing mustache. The man staunchly implanted in his conservative views. Today we sat eating while a story aired about an 80 something year old grandmother being mugged by a 30 year old man.. He muttered "They'll kill him in jail, everyone has a grandmother". "From your lips to gods ears." "Fuck you kid, don't start with me today!" Frank and I don't often agree on much, my cynical views of organized religion, and pretty much anything in general, have often been a point of contention during our lunch break. He knows when I'm trying to get a rise out of him, and rarely plays my games anymore. Its rather unfortunate, I thoroughly enjoyed watching him build up steam while I peppered him with all kinds of bullshit. He would explode in the most fantastic fits of foul language. He swore like Da Vinici painted, it was masterful. I imagine it took many years of hanging around Quincy's dive bars to hone this craft. I admired that in him. Any man who could tolerate me and swear like that is a good man.

Write It Again

Often when I write and I feel something I will just blurt everything out on to the page that I am feeling which you can see in my previous post. I like to go back and re-work things and dig a little deeper. Here is a reworked piece. I hope you enjoy it.

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This whole world, my entire worth is a maddened, scribbled note book sense of self, a draft that only I can read. And even then I know only in an ambiguous sense that it is right that I feel like this and that it is wrong that she doesn’t. The pull on the strings is still tangible, its still there indestructible as it ever was even after her hold on the other end has long since gone limp. Sounds, sights,smells, people and places tug against these strings in the strangest of places and at the most ridiculous of times. They manifest themselves as a brief weakness in my knees or a sharp pain under my shoulder blade where her head once rested as I slept, recovering from another night spent attempting to drown my demons in a vat of hard liquor, the only constant is the pain it is always there. For the love of god, she loved me. I never saw it.

In my head I still smell that August. I can still hear the lawn mowers hacking away at the long grass in the distance. She is warm and glowing, glistening with summer, the smell of tanning lotion thick in the air. She is illuminated by the high sun. Her tan skin and brightly colored towel a sharp contrast to the bone gray sand that surround us. The warm wind brings in the smell of fresh cut grass. This smells and these memories occupy my conscience to the point of obsession. Not a single other thought can be held within the space between my ears. From the time I was thirteen until my twenty second birth day I can not remember the times spent apart from her.

I wake up from this reoccurring dream and quickly shower and get dressed. Out into the night I step. Cold winds come over the harbor this time of year dancing with the two days of stubble I have learned to ignore. Me hair is thinner now and skin more weathered. My eyes once bright with life are now sunken and disengaged. The smell of the ocean makes my heart sink. But the prospect of liquor and drunkenness move my feet forward. Suddenly these strings in my chest pull taught and make me wince with the sharp pain of loss and regret and the feeling that I could have done more is simply overwhelming. Shaking hands unscrew a flask of whiskey, cracking the seal, and a long pull drives the memories back and eases the tension. I never wanted to become the monster that I am now. Addiction is a bitch of a word and I refuse to admit that I have fallen victim to its siren song.

I have always hated being alone, yet I know I must be this way. I have never been content with just any one body in my arms. They all lack the ability to fill me with what she once gave me. There have been countless other women since her. Many of them I thought to be the one. Somehow they all lacked that one thing I can not name and will never be able to replace. For all the life in me I cant allow myself to be content in their embrace. Every time I find myself comparing them to her without fail. No one will ever make me feel that way again. So instead I drink to fill that void.

I stand now less than a sunset from her being married to a man I despise yet I must smile. I must accept the fact that this piece of shit completes her, and that he occupies the space in her heart I know is rightfully mine.. How do I go on after this? How do I accept that the void that I seek to fill in her chest is occupied by another man? How do I stand down and allow myself to be half the man she is to spend the rest of her life with?