Well… 5:58.
Close enough.
Because, at the end of the day, who fucking cares when the buzz starts, as long as it comes. So long as it reminds me I’m still here and have a pulse.
The whiskey hits my tongue with the familiar taste of caramel and heat, and just enough of a burn to feel like penance. It slides down my throat and settles in my chest, wrapping itself around the hollow space where something used to sit. Something that shifts every now and then, like a ghost beneath the surface. Not quite solid, but not quite gone either…
A heavy sigh escapes me as I flop back on the couch and take another long drink. The glass is nearly empty by the time I let it fall back against my thigh, and the ticking fades as the liquor seeps into my bloodstream and the corners of my mind start to blur.
I close my eyes and try to feel my heart beating in time with the clock, but as I press my fingers to my sternum, all I get is a whisper. Just one, and I’m not even sure I really heard it. My body moves, breathes, and swallows the whiskey, but I’m locked somewhere outside of it, reaching for a door that never opens.
But then I feel the shift. The familiar slide into the half-comfort that isn’t comfort at all. It feels both safe and wrong, quiet and loud, empty and full, soft, but not suffocating… just beginning to dull the edges, smoothing out even the static I was hoping might turn into something real. The shame, the isolation, the pain, the craving for purpose, meaning, and sensation… it never really surfaces.
I drink to try to feel something. But all it ever gives me is a quieter kind of empty. A silence I can’t crawl out of.
It’s the most comfortable place I’ve ever hated.
But lately, there have been brief, unexpected moments that bring sparks of awareness. Where I’m suddenly hit with the feel of my own breath, the weight of my limbs, the heat and pressurethat build under my skin… like I’minmy body, even if just for a second.
And I felt that just yesterday… in my office.
I open my eyes and turn my head towards the window. Bare branches sway beyond the glass, just beginning to bud, as their skeletal limbs reach towards a soft blue sky, slowly darkening as the evening settles in. The breeze nudges them gently, and something inside me seems to sway as well, as a breath automatically fills my chest like I’m trying to move with them.
Who even has a favourite fucking tree…
My phone starts buzzing on the coffee table, so I roll my head to see my brother’s name lighting up the screen. Reaching forward to grab it, I blow out a long breath as I prepare to sound more sober than I feel.
“Hey,” I say as I lift the phone to my ear and let my eyes drift back to the window.
“Hey, bud,” Darren replies, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “What’s up?”
My gaze drifts over the living room, bathed in the soft light of the lowering sun. Golden streaks spill through the windows, casting everything in a gentle, settled glow, looking like something out of a life that doesn’t belong to me. One that’s warm, quiet, and almost convincing.
Except the light lands on the truth.
It hits the half-empty whiskey bottle on the coffee table, the amber liquid catching the sun like stained glass. Across the room, last night’s empty glass still sits on the bookshelf, another empty bottle tucked halfway under a pillow on the armchair. A sweater I haven’t picked up in days is slouched over the armrest, and notebooks and scraps of paper are scattered across the floor.
“Just…” my eyes flick to the bookshelf beside the fireplace, “reading.” Then I press the heel of my hand into my eyes and shake my head.
I hate lying to him.
“Nice,” Darren says, and I can hear his kids laughing in the background. “We’re outside watching Hunter and Sophie on their new hoverboards, hoping they don’t injure themselves or each other.”
I huff at the ease with which he says that. “Hoverboards?”
“Yeah,” he says with a chuckle, and I hear his wife, Claire, laugh as well. “That’s what they bought with their birthday money. So, thanks for sending that.”
I don’t understand kids. They just turned eleven, and for the longest time I never knew what to get them. They’re twins with totally different personalities and interests, and a shared need to one-up each other. So once they turned ten, I just started sending them money and let them figure it out.
But hoverboards? What the fuck…
“Good to see you teaching them solid financial skills,” I mutter, tracing the rim of my glass with one finger.
“Fuck off,” he laughs. “If it gets them off screens, I don’t care what they spend their money on.”
“Good to know,” I say, tipping my head back on the couch and looking up at the ceiling. “I’ll double it next year and tell them it’s only for weapons and chaos.”
“My god,” he groans. “Don’t, please.”
