FicWad

Two weeks after first meeting you, I saw you again. If I'd only believed in coincidences, I would probably have called it one; the same place, the same time, the same eerie feeling I couldn't quite begin to understand. We met a couple times after that - only these times we didn't speak much. We barely exchanged quiet hellos. We barely touched. We would spend our time together letting our eyes wander on the surface of one another, and beyond. We would watch and we would see.

I don't think I ever told you this before, but you made the first cracks appear in our newborn story that one night, the one that I'd looked forward to all week. I was so young, and my experience in love summed up to a blunt zero. All I knew of human relationship at that age was how to hate somebody, and how to come out of a fight unharmed. All I knew about men was how to make them want me and then play games that made their minds twist and turn.

I had never been on this side of the table, and I was careful to not let any of my insecurity show. That's how, when you informed me about not wanting to meet me that night, but instead you'd spend the night elsewhere, I was able to text you back saying it was fine by me.
I'm sorry, you said. I wasn't sure what exactly you were sorry for, but I had a feeling it went beyond canceling a so-called date. It did.

I remember laying on my black leather couch one afternoon, quite likely having a The Cure LP playing in my one-bedroom apartment, and receiving that message you sent later.
You were sorry. Your previous girlfriend was giving you one more chance and you just had to take it. You just loved her so much. You were sorry.

It didn't seem like such a betrayal at the time, and although it seems sort of innocent in contrast to what was to come, it was the first.

I did my best to forget you, the one that got away, and kept steering my life in all the wrong directions. I made trips to towns that offered new ground for bad choices and came back feeling hollow. I went to concerts and danced with strangers. I drove my car across the country and flirted with the thought of never stopping.
You called me once, and hung up. I called you back the next day and you told me to forget it.
I thought it was such an unreasonable request from someone who kept making sure they'd be on my mind as soon as I was learning to let things go.

Months after, the screen of my phone mocked me with one simple sentence, an ensemble of words somewhere between a request and an order, and I hated myself for the entire drive to the bar I knew you were in. I saw you there, after what felt like the longest time, and I knew I was precisely where I was supposed to be and that if anything in the entire universe made any sense at all, it was me being here with you.

Of course you'd been drinking. Of course I didn't know better than to not mind.

I don't think I ever had a choice when it came to you, and that is one of the things that I unconsciously accepted while it kept on stealing pieces of who I was before. I became yours without ever really realizing the depth of what it meant to be somebody's.
I lost myself in who you thought you were, and I'm still working so hard to find the fragments.

We were attached - perfectly sown together as if all the world around us had lost its meaning. I suppose my family saw all the warning signs, all the flashing red lights that my eyes averted. I suppose I was only happy to have it happen to them, as an act of rebellion and revenge, serving as a side dish for the relationship I had with you, the ultimate heavenly happiness that you brought to the table.

I remember first realizing that you'd been intoxicated for the most part of our relationship.

I recall understanding the crookedness of the fact, but decided to ignore it.
I had faith in you, I had seen you.

It's tough to pin down the moment my eyes finally opened to see the big picture in all its deformed glory.
There were times that your drunken presence had me on the edge.
Times that made me wonder..
But somehow the haze of my first real experience of content overshadowed the nervous itching that tiptoed into my mind.
The time you shook like a dry autumn leaf in my hall and punched a hole through my bathroom door, or the time you became psychotic with hallucinations while we were trapped in a small cabin together, miles away from anything. You spoke to people that weren't there and I pretended not to be terrified. You laughed and you cried, and made me sit so close to the fireplace that I could nearly smell my hair burning. I sat unable to move, too scared to speak, and for the first time in our relationship, endured. I had no idea that was about to become the biggest part of it.

Through all these things I was still able to see your drinking as normal in some way. Perhaps the thought of you having a drinking problem crossed my mind, but I'd never been able to think of alcoholism as anything else than an old men's problem.
My grandfather had it, and he chased my grandmother down with a knife.
He used to yell at us when we were kids, my brother and I, and together with our cousins we would hide in the shack on the backyard and wrap our tiny fingers around the doorknob, prepared to keep it closed at all costs.

My grandfather made my grandmother drown herself in the river that flowed by.

That was alcoholism to me.


It might've been the first time you lied to me about drinking.

It might've been the time that I had come down with a fever so severe that I was unable to move, eat, or even sleep, and all I remember is the misty, shadowy picture of you sitting on my couch with a twelve-pack's amount of empty beer bottles, going through them one by one in desperate quest to find one with at least a drop of liquid left in it for you to consume.
I was sped to the hospital the next day.

It might've been the time that you stole my descripted sedatives I could hardly cope without, leaving me to deal with my panic disorder with nothing but a wasted boyfriend to help.
That was the first time I saw you on both pills and alcohol. I suppose you didn't understand at the time what exactly caused me to, while hurt and enraged, send you away. I suppose I hadn't yet told you about that other person that once stole my medication and very nearly succeeded in ending his own life. You hadn't yet met my father, after all.

It might've been the vacation I went to with my brother, during which you made something inside me die by doing all the wrongs in the book while I was too many hundred miles away to do anything about it.


It might've been any of the aforementioned things, or none, but the feeling of something being very wrong was slowly growing inside of me, until finally, I let go of the illusion with sadness and regret and admitted it to myself.

I was way in over my head with you. I was in such deep water that it gave an entirely new definition to what people called darkness. I was too far gone, and I needed to find the strength to pull us both back up.

Yes, you made a lot of cracks.
I should be surprised that I held it together for as long as I did, before shattering to pieces.