Learning to Fly

Breathe.

Exhale.

Alright.

Nothing really changed, for better or worse, in the past few days. Following the massive…er…minor meltdown of Wednesday, I woke up yesterday with a realization that things were never going to be the same, in any aspect. Including how I deal with the things flying around in my head and burning in my chest.

Wednesday night I stopped at the Party Source after work. It was an in and out mission, not more than ten minutes later I was back in my car headed across the same bridge I crossed with her a few days ago. This time there was a bottle of bourbon sitting in the passenger’s seat.

“What am I doing?”

I heard the battle raging back and forth in my head. A howling addiction had been stirred up like a cloud of sand on the ocean floor. I pulled into the spot where the two of us had sat smoking cigarettes in the rain and thought over what I was about to go do. The ache in my chest was too great; I needed something to kill that pain for a while.

“Fuck it, I don’t have to tell her that I did this.”

I got out of the car, bottle in hand, and started walking to the front door but I stopped. A wave of guilt hit me. I turned around and hurled the bottle towards the dumpster, watching it shatter as it hit the concrete. I went inside and sat down, pissed off and shaken, still not believing what I had just done. I rolled a joint and sat there smoking in silence, watching the plumes billow and fade into the still air of my apartment. Ash fell onto my shirt as I felt my muscles relax and the haze cloud into my head.

After a few hours of shooting various races of gun-toting terrorists on my Xbox I got up to go smoke. I sat there on the stoop, looking to my right, remembering her standing out there wearing nothing but stockings, a bra, high heels and a coat. Head in my hands, I just need to get up and keep going. I felt it; there will be no quarter for me. No rest for the weary just like yesterday, just like today and just like tomorrow. No rest for the weary.

I flicked the cigarette and got up to walk in, seeing the shattered glass in the back of the lot.

“Well, at least I’m not drinking.”

I’m learning to fly …a little wobbly, but I’m catching on.