Coca-Cola,
its glass bottle his lexicon’s consistent nipple reprising the summer months’
ritualistic consumption but absent what he has yet to repudiate as the benefit
of intoxication. The book too, carried everywhere and referred to as if in its
pages were contained wisdom of Biblical import, and this perhaps true to a
degree in its motif of destiny and that required of its attainment.
Skunk: I
think… I’m finding
His
breath comes as a sigh, almost every one of the afternoon issued as such.
Skunk:
the… idea of… perseverance… Perseverance…
licking
his finger to collect motes of remnant food from off his plate.
Skunk: I
know, mentally I know I have to persevere but I think… my biology is in,
in revolt. It’s my body that wants… the alcohol. It isn’t just my body,
it’s,
He
throws his head back hard into the armchair’s headrest.
Skunk:
That sense of… disappearing, to know that there’s something… there that
I, that I can get that will make me disappear, and when I disappear my… grief…
I can s-, I can kind of step outside the momentum of grief… Because otherwise
it just feels like day after day after day is simply, is bereavement. So it’s
not… Why, why should it be surprising if something, if there is
something I can could can take that does, that will allow me outside that? And
I feel jumpy or or, you know… like black coffee jitters, black coffee shakes
without the coffee. I think my… I understand this as a transition period, I
understand that now, for my body, but what I’m worried about is that my mind…
What if my mind doesn’t adapt? What if my, what if my body adapts to sobriety
but my brain doesn’t, or can’t cope with my grief? How healthy could
that be? How healthy… That’s not right.
cradling
the rough black stubble of his scalp in the fingers of both hands.
Skunk:
Maybe it’s only by having a sober body that I can possibly hope to have… a
sober mind. So I just have to persevere. I have to persevere. I don’t… There
are times where I just want, I don’t I don’t…
He
stops and simply breathes. By the time his prayer is resumed he might be
speaking about any number of things.
Skunk:
I would like to stop, give up… I don’t know that I have any… option. I think it
would be easier, it would be so much easier just to stop, to stop all of this…
Because it does feel like work. Even though I’m not…
now
remembering it is still and always will be there, the option of returning for
the whiskey to sound his last and irreversible passive hurrah.
