I Melt With You

Do I Look Lonely?

Two weeks. It's been two weeks since the incident and I was completely miserable. Of course I had to go and fuck everything up--isn't that what I did?

But no, this wasn't just my fault. It was his. He was the one who had kissed me. He was the one who had attacked me. It was his fault. Half of it at least was on his part--no, maybe even the entire thing.

I scoffed and took another drink from the bottle as I continued to text Sarah. Sarah's so good to me; she kept updating me on how Brendon was and how different he had been acting.

"He's been...more closed up. He's set up a wall for himself that even I can't see through and I'm concerned. You guys really do have a habit of fucking each other up, huh?" she said to me.

I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair and responded into the microphone of the phone, "Of course. It's all we've ever known."

She snorted and I could practically imagine her rolling her eyes. "Then that's not love."

"Well, we love to mess each other up, right?"

She hummed quietly in response. I heard a voice shouting in the distance and she quickly goes, "Oh shit, gotta--one sec, B, I'm coming! Stay safe, Ryan. Don't you fucking dare go out and drive or I will skin you alive. You're too drunk to function right now."

I let out a chuckle and said, "Okay, mom, I promise I won't."

"Don't call me that! You sound like a fan," she snapped.

I laughed again, "Take care of him, Sarah. Bye."

And the conversation ended there and once again, I was left to my own thoughts in this tiny, lonely cottage I called home. It was about...10:30 at night and I had been holed up in my house for those two weeks. Ryland came over occasionally to check in on me, well...check in on me was a bit of a stretch. We mainly got drunk together and he invited a bunch of chicks over and we'd just bang them then kick them out. I was still living the life of a rock star even though I hadn't been in a band in a couple of years.

I sighed and took another sip of beer. The taste had almost become so familiar to me that it was like drinking water. There was no way in hell that was healthy, but I found it hard to give a fuck. If I looked at my life from an outside perspective, people would only see me as a raging alcoholic mess. Well, they're not wrong.

But they're not right either. Is there a way to justify my alcoholism? Maybe not. But I knew that to keep my sanity, to keep my pride, to keep me stable, I needed this drink. But that's not the scary part.

The scary part was that the more I drank, the more I sympathized with my dad, who basically drank himself to death. Dad had only started drinking after Mom had left, and wasn't I doing the exact same thing? I chuckled quietly to myself. Parents always say they don't want their kids to end up like them; they want their kids to live their own individual lives and make a difference.

What was I doing? I was trying to find the answer to the world's life questions at the bottom of a bottle. Maybe that's what my dad was doing, too. Maybe he was trying to find a way to get her back after she had abandoned us. Maybe he hoped that this drink could cure him, when it only infected him even worse. And maybe at the end of it all, he had hoped the drink would kill him just so he didn't have to suffer anymore.

He got what he had hoped for.

I groaned as more thoughts invaded my brain; I didn't want to spend the rest of the night thinking like this so I opened my phone and searched for something, anything, a distraction.

So I messed around on Twitter for a little bit, texted a few friends until I got a call from Sarah.

I scrunched my eyebrows--Sarah only called once a day. Why now?

"Hello?"

"Fuck, fuck, Ryan," she sobbed. "He's gone and I don't know where he's went. I could tell he was drinking and he just--" I immediately snapped out of my somewhat drunken state and attempted to be more alert. She was crying. Something happened.

"Sarah, wait, slow down, what?"

"He left Ryan and I don't know where he is going. He hopped into the car and I could smell the alcohol on his breath and I tried to stop him, but he wouldn't listen. He just shoved me aside and God--"

"Wait, are you okay?"

"Don't worry about me!" she cried.

"No, no, Sarah, you don't understand--he doesn't matter right now, that was his own decision. What matters is if you're okay; did he hurt you, are you--"

"I'm fine; it was just a shove. He didn't mean it, I think." Yeah, that's what they all say to convince themselves, Sarah. Take it from a person who's experienced physical and verbal abuse all the time from drunkards. Keep telling yourself he didn't mean it. Maybe you'll be right. "--but what matters Ryan is that he's on the road and he's not okay. He could get into a car accident, he could--" She continued to choke on her sobs and her rushed breaths quickened.

I was about to respond when I heard a knock at my door. I felt my stomach drop. Oh. Oh.

"Ryan?" she sniffled.

"Sarah, I-I think I know where he's gone."

"Oh." And then I heard the bitterness in her voice. "I see. Okay."

"Sarah?" I whispered into the phone.

"No, p-please don't mind me. It's just...hard. Have you ever loved someone so much and then just see them drop you from your life? Like they don't care about you anymore when all you've done is taken care of them?"

"Yeah." No. No I haven't. I've never been in that position, but I know someone who was, and maybe still, was in that position. And then I looked to the door again. "I gotta go."

And I was barely able to hear her as she quietly murmured into the speaker, "Please love him for me."