They Tell You About the Addict (day 88)

Bottles of every color smash to pieces all around me. I can hear them breaking like echoes of a thousand exploding planets which pierce and cut the sun. There is a fraying inside of me which is imperceptible to others and unmistakable to me. I am not fine. I am not smiling unless it belongs. My palms sweat when she pours her wine. My eyes flash against the pale pink and then against her. We both look away. My skin is the cool of liquid sensation just out of reach. My veins are the drops of condensation sliding along the smooth curves of the glass which no longer exists for my slender fingers.

If I told you I was frustrated you could not understand. If I told you I was angry you would think you knew why and that’s why I keep it to myself. There is something punishing in the familiar. There is something wrong with me because when he tells me I’m an inspiration I say thank you deadpan like the punchline in the tired telling of a stupid joke.

They tell you about the angry drunk.. They tell you about the fucking addict who gets agitated when you take her shit away. But what they never told me was that I’d get better the way I am. So much better that my obsession with the drink followed by my obsession with the absence of the drink is now followed by a strange fixation on the vibrations which occupy another plane entirely.

What I tried to force to fit still hasn’t let up because you can stab at a thing until you think it’s dead but you can’t quit yourself. Not in the darkness. Not in the light. And the frustration is all your own. It is yours like an animal yours like a siren going off all the time. And you sip your coffee and you take your foot off the brake and you wonder how you got so far without knowing if you can handle the machine that is your mind. The heavy weight that is your sober body moving forward into the cold hard day. The light changes on the traffic pole and in the sky behind the funeral home you pass next to the graveyard. The light changes you as it divides the trees.