Guilt isn’t an emotion.
It’s a living, breathing organism. It’s another man living deep inside you, screaming so loud sometimes that you wish you could tear off your skin and let him escape.
But you can’t.
And there’s nothing you can do to silence him.
Nothing at all.
There are things that you think will help you.
Wicked, beautiful things.
Sex.
Narcotics.
Alcohol.
They all sing their sweet siren songs to you, hoping you don’t recognize the evil underneath. They are a temptress, promising to alleviate your pain, promising you a soft, warm hug. They promise you the world.
And they deliver. They always keep their promise. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a few hours, they let you be taken by the undertow.
That’s why you keep going back. Because they don’t lie.
And because the next day the guilt has multiplied. You’re an even worse person than you were before, as if that was even possible. As if the hate inside you for yourself could ever deepen.
But it does.
Again and again.
Day in and day out.
And there’s only one way to get through it.
To dull the pain.
Mask the sorrow.
Numb the hate.
You do it to yourself again.
Until it’s the rest of your life.
But I don’t want it to be the rest of my life.
Because there is someone in my life that makes it worth living. That makes me want to be a better man. That makes me want to fight against all the things I’ve given into time and time again.
The irony is, I think I’ve already lost her.
I don’t even have to open my eyes to know she’s not with me.
Her absence hits me harder than the pain inside my head, the sour, rolling swell in my gut. When Kayla isn’t in bed beside me, I feel utterly adrift.
Alone.
Somehow I push aside the self-pity, the loathing and the hate, and try to formulate a plan. My brain is sluggish and keeps re-circuiting into old patterns. It’s painful to re-route it, to concentrate, to figure out what to do to fix this before it’s too late.
If it’s not already too late.
I open my eyes and the sunlight streaming in through the window nearly blinds me. I blink at it, gathering courage, pushing past the sick agony that rushing inside me.
I don’t remember much from yesterday and that’s a problem.
It didn’t use to be a problem. The blackouts. There was something so neat and tidy about them. Whatever happened in the spaces I didn’t remember, never happened. Even if someone told me that I fought someone or said something horrible or vomited all over the bar, or whatever it was, I couldn’t conjure up the memory for the life of me. So it became like make believe and I just pretended that it was some other guy who did all of that because me, me, well I would know exactly what I had done.
But now, I had no idea what I’d done and I could no longer pretend it happened to someone else. Now Kayla was involved and I cared more about her than anything.
I remember practice. I remember…well, I remember before practice. Going to a pub up the street, having two pints of ale. I hadn’t eaten anything that morning except for eggs and in my strange rational, I thought the two beers would be better than nothing.
But that was just an excuse I was making myself. I knew that. I had woken up sick and worried about what Kayla’s decision was going to be. Even though she told me she was going to stay, it wasn’t real until she told someone else other than me. I was so used to people telling me what they thought I wanted to hear and I wanted to see it, to know it.
I wanted to take the edge off. I wanted to not care.
But that’s not how your temptress always works.
She riled me up instead.
She added fuel to a bonfire.
Denny already pissed me off earlier in practice and for whatever reason, I wanted to hurt him. Really hurt him. As if that would make it all better, my anger having some place to go.