Back to Shore

I'm not an alcoholic but I guess the four glasses of whiskey, empty, lined up on my coffee table at dawn didn't help my case much. It's very hard to live up to the expectations of the world nowadays, when alcohol and God are being shoved down your throat before you even regain consciousness from your last high. Let's just get one thing straight right now: I'm not an alcoholic.

 "Holden, dear?"

 God, I hate how the sound of that woman's voice drives me mad. I could be sober and I would be beside myself with intoxication at the tinkle of her giggles.

 "Holden?"

 I could hear her footsteps resonating pointedly as she neared my hiding spot. Often times, the hardest place to hide is in your own beloved home.

 "What's wrong, dear?" She asked, curling up on the arm of the sofa like a Siamese kitten, expensive and highly trained in the art of finer things.

 "You know, Leen, I'm tired of this whole twenty-two and established facade. Shouldn't I be struggling? Shouldn't I be experimenting with cubism and street performing and poverty?" My hands shook as I gripped onto my flask, slipping out of my pants pocket like the watch I had dropped yesteryear, and the woman I had lost amongst my doubts in high school.

 "Well, Holden, you have this thing called talent and maybe you don't know how to use it for good, but there are a lot of young men and women out in the world that would kill for what you have. They would kill a poor beggar with their bare hands to be able to show their parents their book, clutched in people's arms everywhere they turn."

 It makes you really think, doesn't it? When people tell me that they would kill to be in my place, it makes me think about the people they would kill, the ones that don't matter, the ones that just hold a place in society until the next baby is ready to be born into a dinner table clad with silver spoons.

 At this moment, Evangeline's sympathetic smile and adoring eyes made me so goddamn mad. I knew good and well that she had been one of those babies, those little "bundles of joy" that had been born into not only silver spoons, but silver bowls and tea cups... Hell, knowing her father, they probably ate silver coated shrimp. And someone had been killed in cold blood for my Leen to have a spot at that shiny goddamn dinner table. Imagine that!

 I watched her curl up, so dainty. It's almost like she was this ethereal being that I had stolen on one of my various trips to Heaven, as if such a place was nothing but a popular tourist spot in Bulgaria, where I spent that one summer with that one girl who turned out to be nothing I had expected. No other woman would ever compare to Evangeline. My Leen.

 I'm not an alcoholic but I was well through my bottle of Merlot when I realized that Leen was gone. It's comforting to know that her departure is always reliable, if anything else. The wine ran hot down my throat, burning, burning, burning. My head was above water and I could feel myself at a steady level, just floating on. It's so nice to be so comfortable.

 My book was doing better than expected, which should've thrilled me, but it didn't. There's something seriously wrong with people that enjoy reading about some scrawny kid who hates himself, and not even in the funny, "Aw shucks, not again!" way but in the dark, "Yet again I find myself alone on the corner of a dingy street, too nervous to approach a prostitute, a low woman who I should've been excited to tower over and dominate."

 That's an excerpt from my book, which stings me real bad because I know none of the men quoting it actually feel that way. Give them a prostitute and they'll act like they've been King since the dinosaurs in the museum were free to breathe. By the time I was done stinging, my bottle of Merlot, a gift from Evangeline's dad, was almost gone, and what little I had left sloshed around the bottom of the bottle, like waves rocking a sailboat along the numb ocean.

 Merlot was reluctant to let me stand up. One sip, two sips, three sips, I couldn't breathe and I was feeling so nice. It's crazy how the burning in your head disguises the burning in your liver, and you almost forgot how close you are to your finish line. You see, being drunk is like swimming and the water is glistening so gorgeously above your back. You're gliding and going and all you can think about is how you're a fish, you're a mermaid, you're really getting some distance in this race! And then you bump into some seaweed, but you laugh and keep gliding, shaking it off like a bug on your windshield.

 The merlot was fully drained by the time I figured out how to wrestle myself free from the depths of the unknown, pulling myself ashore with ragged breaths and that god awful red uniform with the phony white cross on it, a continuous representation of God being shoved down your waterlogged throat.

Being drunk is like swimming to shore after a shipwreck. I felt myself slipping in and out of consciousness, my flask hitting the floor like a slap in my sagging face. I was drowning, sinking, my god was with me, coursing down my throat and through my veins in the form of one last shot of whiskey, one last shot at carving my legend in stone. Being twenty two and famous is never what I wanted. Being twenty two and dead was what I had always pictured for myself. I was never scared to drown, but for me, looking back on my fifth and final suicide attempt at the age of twenty two and three months, I thank God everyday that I learned how to swim. I'm not an alcoholic.

Author's Note

Be as harsh as you want!