Lost in a World of Snow

She caught you one day, doing lines of coke on your kitchen table while your four-year-old slept two doors down. She had known about your addiction for months now. You had fought about it many times before. Your parents, your sisters, even your friends had tried in vain to intervene. But this time, it was different. This time was the first time that you had gotten high in the home that you shared with her. She had reached her limit. She couldn’t take it anymore. She got up in your face whispering angrily, desperate to try and make you see sense. You were lost to her though, in your own world of snow. The warm and earthy smell of bourbon hung heavily in the air. She shook you as she begged and pleaded with you. After half an hour of that, you finally couldn’t take it anymore. You got up and grabbed the whiskey bottle off the table. In one rough motion, you threw it. You watched it as it sailed through the air and hit the wall a few inches away from her head. She stared at you in horror. You watched as her expression went from anger to fear, as the realization of what you had done set in. But you stared at her blankly, not comprehending anything that had happened. 

You were too far gone.

She backed out of the room as tears rolled down her face. You watched her as if from a distance, adrift in your world full of short-term bliss. You had just thrown a whiskey bottle at the mother of your child. You had almost killed your own wife. Had almost murdered her, all for a few lines of snow and a few moments of false euphoria. And yet, you hadn’t even realized what you had just done.

You were too far gone.

You staggered over to the couch and passed out with your feet dangling over the edge. You didn’t wake up until the next night. An entire day had gone by. Your wife and son were already asleep by then. They knew better than to try and wake you. Even your son had understood that daddy wasn’t daddy anymore. He didn’t even know the reason for it. He didn’t know that his daddy, the person who, until a year ago, had been his best buddy in the entire world, now cared more about a few grams of coke than he did about him. He just knew that his daddy wasn’t the same daddy that he had been before. Your wife had told him that daddy just worked a lot and that’s why he didn’t have time for him. So your son, the same one whose birthday party you had slept through, blew the candles on the cake and wished with all his heart that his daddy would work a little less and have a little more time for him. But you didn’t know that.

You were too far gone. 

You stumbled over to the bathroom and stood in front of the floor-length mirror. Your wife appeared in the doorway behind you and your eyes met for the first time in what seemed like months. Take a good look at yourself, Brandon, and see what you’ve become, you heard her say. So you did. You noted the disheveled hair. The untucked, wrinkled, blue shirt. You hadn’t even bothered to shave in days. And then you looked into your own eyes. They were wrong somehow. Eyes that had always been a warm, honey brown, full of love and kindness were now dark, vacant and lost. You saw the blue purplish bags underneath them. You couldn’t even recognize yourself. These changes had not occurred overnight. They’d taken months to develop. And yet, you hadn’t noticed.  

You were too far gone.

With sheer terror and dread, you thought about what you had done the night before. Now that the high was over, you finally realized what you had done. You couldn’t even look at yourself anymore. You had done what you thought you were never capable of doing. An unforgivable crime. You had hurt the mother of your child. The love of your life. You had hit rock bottom. You threw your fist into mirror with an angry cry filled with raw pain and anguish, shattering it. Your wife. Your family. The family that you were supposed to cherish and love and protect. You had torn them apart, wreaked havoc upon them. And you hadn’t even realized that you had done it.

You were too far gone.

As you stood heaving in front of the broken mirror, you made a decision. The only decision left to make. A single tear rolled down your face as you headed back into your bedroom. She wasn’t there. So you walked over to your son’s room as quietly as you could. She was cuddled up with your child, both of them clinging on to each other as if they were one another’s lifelines. You stared at them from the doorway for a long time. You knew that you had to do better by them. You had to be the husband and father that they deserved. But to do that, you needed to betray them. You weren't sure if you could go through with it all the way. But you sure as hell would try. You needed to leave until you could get clean. So you shut the door softly and headed over to your closet. You packed a duffel bag with a few necessities. Along with that, you packed a little bit of motivation in the form of a picture of your family that had been taken during happier times. You knew that you needed to leave. You would head over to a hotel and get a room, preferably one without a minibar. And come morning, you would check yourself into the rehab that your family had been trying to convince you to go to. You knew that, at that very moment, you were not the husband and the father that your family deserved. But what you didn’t know was that your son had woken up when you were packing your bag. And the only thing that he had felt as he watched you leave was relief.

You were that far gone.