Whiskeyheart

CW: Substance abuse, Mental health

“I’m dying,” I whine, like a hypochondriac drama queen.

Whiskey, my only housemate, looks at me with pure contempt. Even my cat hates me.

“I have no food.”

“I have no water.”

“My litter box is filthy.”

“My pee and shit are all over the house.”

“Neatly next to the hairballs I’ve puked up.”

“Just like I puke you up.”

“I get no attention.”

“I want a different owner.”

I ignore him. I’ve sunk so low that even the welfare of my loyal four-legged companion no longer interests me.

I hold my hair — wet strands stuck to my face — back with one hand so I don’t vomit into it while I heave up nothing but bile over the toilet.

It doesn’t matter. Vomit in my hair or not, I remain a neglected, worthless woman with only one desire.

I push myself upright with difficulty. My legs feel like a marionette’s. I don’t even flush the toilet. I don’t wipe my face. Not important.

I steady myself on everything I pass.

The rim of the toilet. Doorframes. The wall in the hallway. Step by shuffling step, half-stumbling because of the litres of alcohol in my blood still partying from the night before.

The only thing that matters is surviving yet another alcohol poisoning.

I don’t understand why I don’t have liver cirrhosis yet. Even my blood tests show no abnormalities.

Anyway — back to survival mode.

Crashing on the couch and drowning in self-pity doesn’t help. I know that by now. Why suffer longer than necessary?

With one simple trick I can fix everything. The most destructive trick there is. Very simple. Brutally effective.

All I have to do is cross the living room and make it to the fridge without wrecking myself.

To keep from falling, I lower myself to the floor and crawl on hands and knees toward the kitchen.

I’ve reached the point where shame hasn’t been a factor in a very long time.

Four deep gulps of pure gin, straight from the bottle, on an empty stomach.

Half an hour later: problem solved. I’m back.

Two hours and three gin-tonics later, I’m tired of myself again. Tired of my procrastination. But even that doesn’t matter. No one cares anymore.

Reluctantly, I force myself into a quick shower and take care of Whiskey.

My head feels light. Yesterday’s aftermath, or today’s warning?

“How did I get home last night?”

“What’s the last thing I remember?”

I haven’t seen any half-naked man wandering through my house — the kind I always regret when sober. I rarely remember his name.

There are no traces of violence either. Apparently I wasn’t arrested for public drunkenness, otherwise I’d be sitting in a holding cell right now.

I didn’t wreck my living room in blind rage. Didn’t storm around screaming and throwing whatever I could get my hands on. Didn’t slam the doors so hard and so often that the frames tore out of the walls.

The gin is gone. A bottle of whisky stands on the floor beside me. I sit on the couch, uninterested.

I’ve driven everyone out of my life. Husband. Children. Family. Friends. Career.

I don’t care. I have only one loyal friend left: alcohol.

The doorbell rings. I open only because I know it’s the pizza delivery guy. Normally, I don’t open the door for anyone. I don’t answer the phone either.

These days, there’s no real need for that anymore.

No one rings my bell.

No one calls.

No one hires me.

No one loves me.

I eat half the pizza reluctantly. Because I have to.

My diet has shrunk to pizza.

The stack of empty boxes blocks the door to the garden.

The garden is overgrown with weeds.

Which means it’s basically full of me.

I am a weed.

Weeds never die.

Especially not when they’re pickled in spirits.

The hours drag by, as if they’d rather pass in another time zone than witness my self-destruction.

The bottom of the whisky bottle comes into view. I’m tipsy. That’s when I’m at my best.

I walk to the liquor cabinet and feel like a child in a candy store — except this time there’s no mother to tell me when it’s enough.

Absinthe or tequila? Or both?

The last functioning brain cell warns me about the risks, on top of everything I’ve already had.

Fine. Absinthe it is.

Gin, whisky, absinthe… it doesn’t make any difference anymore.

I snatch my journal and a pen from the desk and collapse onto the couch again. First I fill a tall glass with absinthe. Then I open my journal to write down, in drunken rambling, what I experience, feel, endure.

Tomorrow I won’t be able to read my own handwriting. Tomorrow I won’t understand anything of the tangled flood of words.

With effort I piece together a few lines:

“2012: six months sober with AA.”

“2014: three years sober, thanks to Antabuse.”

I remember how easy complete abstinence actually is.

I dodge the question of why I keep relapsing.

My escape into alcohol

is an escape from my reality.

From not having to feel anything.

From the pain of failing.

The pain of rejection.

The pain of being left behind.

Away from a world I never wanted to be born into.

Only to arrive, again, at the sobering realisation that it solves nothing.

That disappointment alone is enough to make me reach for the bottle again.

My thoughts drift. My confrontation with myself runs aground.

The second tall glass is half empty.

My glass is always half empty.

My life too.

My body too.

And the bottle must be empty.

I feel sluggish and dizzy. It’s not even five in the afternoon.

My phone vibrates out of nowhere, my hands shaking with it — the tremor that’s the lasting consequence of thirty years of alcohol abuse.

I don’t pick up. I never do.

I hear my father crying on my voicemail. My mother has died.

Beneath my stoic self-destruction lies a thin layer of emotion — whether I like it or not.

A sharp sting of grief.

Anger at myself for being too drunk to call him back.

To cry with him.

I drink the rest of the absinthe and lose consciousness.

Cheers. Another blackout. Another self-inflicted coma.

The next morning, I don’t wake up.

Alcohol has gently pushed me out of life.

Whiskey sits beside me, grieving.

No — I drove myself into death.

The drink was only the means.

My body is found almost a week later by my neighbour,

who became suspicious because Whiskey had been crying outside her door for days.

My dead whiskeyheart cries with him.

Like a soft breeze on a warm spring day.