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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.
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What works here is that it sounds like someone who’s drowning in addiction instead of someone describing addiction from the outside. The voice stays bitter, exhausted, sarcastic, numb — all the way through. That makes it believable. The best parts are when the writing stays physical and ugly instead of trying too hard to sound poetic. Stuff like crawling to the kitchen, puking bile, not flushing the toilet, the shaking hands, the pile of pizza boxes — that’s the stuff that hits hardest because it feels real. Whiskey also works well. He’s not just “the cat.” He becomes guilt, company, judgment, and the only living thing left in her life. The ending lands because he’s been there the whole time. The lines that hit me hardest were-
“I’ve reached the point where shame hasn’t been a factor in a very long time.”
“The only thing that matters is surviving yet another alcohol poisoning.”
“The garden is overgrown with weeds. Which means it’s basically full of me.”
“No — I drove myself into death. The drink was only the means.”
Those feel honest instead of written for effect. Though, this feels raw in a way a lot of addiction writing doesn’t. It doesn’t romanticize alcoholism, but it also doesn’t turn the narrator into a cliché. It feels self-aware, ashamed, angry, funny, hopeless, and exhausted at the same time. That’s why it works.
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Tomorrow I will copy my cat 🤔😇😉
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I'm curious since you're now reading some of my older stuff. Please be honest, I'm not fishing for compliments. I'm too subjectively involved (duh) but do you remark differences in writing between the earlier ones and my latest?
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The newer stuff feels more controlled and intentional to me. The older stories already had the same voice and obsessions — systems overriding people, emotional isolation, bureaucracy becoming violence, that sort of thing — but they feel more driven by raw emotional/conceptual force. The newer work feels more constructed. Not colder, just more deliberate. The older pieces tend to circle their themes. They push their central idea again and again, sometimes like they don’t trust the reader to sit with implication alone. The newer writing seems more comfortable letting things emerge through structure, imagery, character dynamics, and repetition instead of articulating the meaning out loud. I also think the characterization got stronger. Earlier on, characters sometimes sounded like variations of the same philosophical voice serving the story’s thesis. In the newer work, people feel more distinct from one another — their dialogue reflects personality, profession, psychology, class, self-interest, etc. The older writing is denser and more saturated. It stacks metaphor, aphorism, bleakness, and thematic lines. That gives it intensity, but sometimes everything sits at the same emotional volume. The newer work modulates pressure better. It allows quieter procedural or observational moments, which makes the sharper lines land harder. The symbolism also feels tighter now. Earlier stories sometimes accumulated metaphors the newer stuff feels like the imagery is part of a more unified system carrying the story underneath the surface. What didn’t change is the core sensibility. It still very much feels like the same writer. The themes, tone, worldview, and attraction to institutional absurdity and emotional displacement are all still there. The difference is that the newer writing feels more precise, restrained, and confident.
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I replied earlir but I would like to express my BIG THANK you once more.
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Difficult (emotionally) story to read but quite honest. I love how the cat is named Whiskey so you can easily confuse what is being referenced. You might consider removing the line, "My life too," after "My glass is always half empty," since that sentiment nicely conveys both. I feel now for her father who has two deaths to grieve, and I wonder if the circumstances are similar.
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Thank you — I’m really glad the ambiguity between Whiskey the cat and whiskey the drink worked for you; that tension was very deliberate. And I appreciate the edit suggestion too — you’re right that the line can stand on its own, so it’s a fair question whether spelling it out adds or dulls the echo.
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I like how you have taken a very difficult topic and sad outcome and kept a certain detached lightness to it, which I think truly reflects the ambivalence and denial when it comes to addiction. It's a slow but steady descent into self-destruction, and I was hoping she would find the motivation somewhere to pull herself out of it. But when you no longer care about feeding your four-legged friends, it's a clear sign that you've reached the point of no return, sadly. You managed to evoke a range of emotions in me while reading this, which is testament to your writing. My only small criticism would be that the end felt slightly rushed, you maybe have been able to keep the suspense going slightly longer about how it would end. But overall, a powerful piece, well done!
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Thank you so much for taking the time to read my story and for leaving such a thoughtful comment.
You understood the emotional core exactly as intended — the denial, the distance, and the slow slide into something that feels inevitable.
Your note about the ending is very valuable; I completely see what you mean. I chose for abruptness to mirror the character’s state of mind, but I agree that holding the tension a little longer could strengthen the impact. I really appreciate that insight.
Thank you again for your careful reading — it truly means a lot.
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heartbreaking gng
I lv it
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Thank you for reading and for your kind words!
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yooooooooooooooooo
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