B, I think he would give them to me if I asked.
I’m breaking his heart with my drinking. I’m breaking everyone's heart, you know? But they don’t understand that this is the only way I know how to survive.
I still can’t look at him.
It’s been eighteen months without you. Fuck, I miss the sun.
I woke up one morning with a piece of paper left on the pillow he uses at night, with a scribbled address on it. His new home. I don’t know how he managed to stay inside the house next door for this long, but it still mademe cry my fucking eyes out. Like a final chapter closing on the life I knew. The absence of him next door is jarring, like I can feel it now that I know he doesn’t live there anymore.
I drank for three days straight. I ripped the blankets covering my windows and threw anything I could think of across the driveway. Markers, pens, books, and shoes. I was in a drunken breakdown, something that hadn’t ever happened. Not like that. I wanted him to push open the window. I was brave under the cloak of alcohol and ready to face seeing him.
God, I just wanted to see him.
But he wasn’t there.
Tucker busted into my bedroom, pulled me away from the window, and rocked me in his arms on the floor while I screamed and cried. He whispered all the things that he could to calm me. Promising me he was okay. He just moved. He wasokay.My big brother rubbed my back while I puked up my weakness into the toilet. He helped me change my clothes and put me to bed. He sat in my room, back pressed against the side of my bed on the floor until I fell asleep, hugging Red.
That was the first time I let Tucker in. But when he came to check on me the next day, I ignored him. I ignored the flash of pain in his eyes. I ignored his shout of anger. I ignored the fact that I was ruining our relationship. It was easier that way.
I didn’t go to that scribbled address for two weeks. I spent my nights in bars, in clubs. Where no one shamed me for drinking. I used and abused my new fake I.D. I didn’t have to beg people to buy me alcohol outside of liquor stores anymore. It was freeing and dangerous, and sometimes the guilt and fear of who I was becoming became too much to bear. That’s what happened the first night I showed up at the redwood door.
That’s how I felt when I threw myself at his chest, eyes squeezed closed as soon as he opened the door, and I saw his bare feet on the threshold.
His hands were just as frantic as mine. Nose inhaling my scent, buried in my hair. I held my hand on his racing pulse, and he did the same to me. So we could reassure ourselves that the other had made it this far.
That we were real and alive.
I stole him in pieces, just so I could breathe.
Dear B,
I can’t decide if time feels like it’s slowing down or speeding up.
All I know is that it won’t stop.
Somehow, it's been two years without you today.
I feel like some time over the last twenty-four months I should have learned how to live again. Your Mom gardens and goes to work and laughs with my parents, even if it doesn’t sound as full as it used to. Your brother is going to school, he works and lives alone.
Everyone else is figuring out how to make their world keep spinning, and I’m frozen in a reality that just keeps reminding me that you’re gone.
But it’s more than that, B.
I can’t function without it anymore.
I puke.
I shake.
It feels like I’m crawling out of my own skin.
I’m terrified.
I can’t stop.
I don’t even remember what it feels like to be sober anymore. To not wake up clammy, the taste of it all bitter on my tongue.
It doesn’t make me feel alive anymore.
