As the sky streaks orange and purple with the onset of the evening, I pull into a motel parking lot with a neon VACANCY sign flickering in the office window. The building is squat and rectangular, painted a tired shade of beige. I cut the engine, and the bottle in the cup holder catches my eye. The glass is warm from the sun, and the amber liquid inside shifts when I pick it up. My fingers curl tighter around it, muscle memory guiding the motion.
The cap twists loose with a soft crack. The smell hits me hard. It’s sharp, familiar, and faintly nauseating. I hesitate for a second when the rim reaches my lips, not because I don’t want it, but because I know exactly what will follow. The burn across my chest will give a momentary, fragile illusion of relief, until the emptiness rushes in, even deeper than before.
I tilt the bottle back anyway. The whiskey slides down my throat like fire, igniting a familiar path to the emptiness inside my heart. Nothing about it feels like relief, just postponement.
When I wake, my cheek is pressed against a pillow that smells faintly of mildew and the person who slept here before me. My eyelids flutter open to the unfamiliar room, and panic flares for a moment before fuzzy memories settle over me.
The road. The motel. Rosie. The bottle…
I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth, trying to remove the taste of decay, as my head pounds in time with my pulse. Weak sunlight filters through the thincurtains, painting pale strips across the stained carpet. I push myself upright slowly, and my stomach protests violently. When I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, my foot kicks the empty bottle, lying on its side on the floor.
Of course it’s empty.
For nearly three weeks, I’ve woken every afternoon with the same impossible wish in my chest: If I can’t forget how much it hurts to not have her, then I want to trade places. I would rather I’d died instead.
I can’t keep doing this. Not because I’m not strong enough or suddenly have an undeniable wish to live, but because this half-existence—the slow erosion of everything Rosie loved about me—feels like a betrayal I could never have committed while she was alive.
“I’m a fucking cliché.” The words scrape up my throat, the bitterness in them surprising me. I scrub my hands over my face and let out a dry, humorless laugh. I know this story. Everyone does. Famous musician drinks himself into oblivion, and eventually—inevitably—he ends up in rehab.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the empty room.
By late afternoon, the road stretches before me again. But this drive feels different, purposeful in a way that makes my stomach knot. My destination isn’t aimless. I found it last night during a brief internet search, choosing it simply because it was the closest and provided less time to change my mind.
It’s January 21st. Today marks exactly one year since the day I lost my dreamer. I need to do this today.For Rosie.
The rehab center sits at the edge of a wooded property. Gravel crunches beneath my tires as I pull into the parking lot. The building is modest, with wide windows, pale siding, and a wraparound porch lined with empty chairs, facing a strand of trees swaying gently in the wind.
The Bronco vibrates beneath me, as I sit with the engine running, my hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly they ache. I debate whether or not I belong here instead of dive bars and cheap motel rooms. But I know where that road leads. I see it every time I look in the mirror, in the emptiness behind my own eyes.
Rosie deserves better than watching me disappear, even if she isn’t here to see what I choose.
The intake process is quiet and clinical. A man methodically checks my belongings for contraband. His movements are practiced and detached, and his rifling through my things doesn’t bother me until he reaches Rosie’s journal. He flips it open casually, his fingers roughly flipping through the pages.
“Hey!” The lone word cracks through the air sharper than I intend.
He looks up, startled. “I need to?—”
“Don’t.” My voice cracks, and I swallow hard, forcing the words through the sudden tightness in my throat. “Don’t… touch it like that.”
He pauses, then closes the journal gently and sets it aside with deliberate care. “I’m sorry.” I nod, unable to explain that those pages are the closest thing I have left to her voiceor that losing it would destroy me in ways alcohol never could.
After ensuring I’m not trying to smuggle in booze or drugs, he leads me toward the dormitory section of the center. My private room is small and far cleaner than the beds I have been sleeping in. I set my bag on the edge of the mattress and unzip it slowly. Rosie’s sweater is sitting on top. I pull it out and press it to my face. It still smells like her. Or maybe I’ve memorized her sweet floral scent so completely that my mind supplies what isn’t really there. After laying it across the pillow, I grab the photograph and place the frame on the bedside table. Her smile is infinite. She looks like someone who believed we had all the time in the world.
“I’m here, dreamer.” It feels important that she knows, because I know how badly she would want me to get help.
A knock sounds at the door, gentle but firm. An orderly steps into the open threshold and announces, “Group starts in an hour.”
An hour until I have to sit in a room and say out loud what I’ve been trying to drown out for almost a year. Sixty minutes until I have to admit to a room full of strangers that I’m not okay. That I haven’t been since the moment the world took her from me.
I wake up and turn my head toward the glowing red numbers on the small digital clock beside my bed.
7:02 a.m.
Outside my room, the hallway is still quiet. It hasn’t yet been filled with the shuffle of footsteps and the murmurs of men starting another day they aren’t sure they want to do sober.
The tightness in my chest is a daily reminder of my conscious effort to change. Thirty long days since the last swallow of whiskey burned its way down my throat in that motel room in Kansas. Thirty days since I woke up tasting regret, bile, and something so dangerously close to surrender that I finally sought help.
Thirty days without a drink.
