Alone [manxman]

six:: when recovery is repetitive and reflective.

[All I Want by Kodaline]

SIX: when recovery is repetitive and reflective.

I wasn't sure why it felt like I owed something to everyone who loved me.

I owed it to Abuelita for sneaking alcohol into the hospital, kissing her forehead with liquor on my lips. I owed it to my mother for making her life so much harder than it needed to be.

My recovery was never about me, my life really wasn't either. I didn't live that way, the way I tried to live was for the betterment of... someone. It didn't matter who, from the moment I realized that I had a passion, a true, all consuming passion... my dream was to impact someone with it.

I set out to live in such a way that I'd do more good than anything. I always tried. I never slacked on a dream that I was so invested in, I liked scheduling my life in decades, in plans for the future.

I hated the uncertain.

And my recovery was no better.

-

My mother hated alcohol.

That was something she never really budged on. My father, since I could remember, always took a shot before work. Maybe he needed it, disguised it as something to take the edge off, I didn't understand it until I'd gotten older.

He'd come home and sit in our garage, watch soccer and reruns that he'd missed over work and use that time to wind down, beer in hand. I'd go in, I'd sit beside him, we wouldn't speak.

We never really spoke, that was just how it was. There wasn't much to talk about and he never really related to me anyways.

I thought it was the fact that I preferred art, I think it was that he already knew. I think they all kind of knew, looking back.

It was something he wanted with Milo but my thirteenth year of life really put a strain on everything. Maybe to my parents, it felt like they needed to pick sides. I wasn't sure what side they were choosing but it felt like mine after a while.

Even if I didn't live at home, when I came back, they greeted with open arms and it felt good.

Since fifteen, I'd visit home on Sundays and have a beer with my father. We'd watch the game.

It wasn't supposed to be that way, Abuelita made sure to remind me that family was not supposed to be so distant.

But physically being in the same room with my brother made me want to claw my skin off, it made me wanna hide outside of my body, watch his hate fester from an onlookers eyes.

I wondered if other people could see how much I disgusted him. Maybe that's why it was still so hard to forgive him seven years later.

So, I avoided family.

I moved out at fourteen, I moved in with the boys, I made shitty YouTube videos and got way too drunk. I was taking a shot before heading to school, fucking older men that bought me alcohol. I always fell in love and it always ended.

I dated way too old, and everyone knew. Brandon often judged, often called those men out for being over 25 and fucking on a kid, cause that was what I was... a kid. Lanny tried to keep it in.

My first boyfriend was a guy I met through YouTube, Nic Morelli, he was a twenty-two year old lifestyle blogger based out of Ann Arbor, I was sixteen. We hooked up the first time we met and something that I'd later fall into a cycle of... I fell in love. I moved in with him, doing so for a year, until I realized he was also dating a girl his age in Detroit.