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.
So I hurt him. I slammed into him as he came at me, wanting the ball and for that moment I thought, No way mate, you won’t stop me.
And so I stopped him. I barely felt the impact myself.
Alan was pissed. Everyone was. And Brigs, I saw him up in the stands, watching me, and I could feel his disappointed from all the way up there.
I fucked up.
In one of the worst ways possible.
I hurt one of my own which means I hurt my teammate which means I hurt myself.
But that was the point, wasn’t it?
Everything after that was a blur.
I left the stadium and went up the street to the same pub I was at earlier. Drank a pint. Brigs came by, tried to talk to me but he’s the last person I want to hear from sometimes. Sometimes he’s my brother. Sometimes he’s just a reminder that I don’t really belong. That my family isn’t my blood. And that my blood thought I wasn’t worth keeping around.
I remember coming back to the flat but feeling so ashamed of what had happened, so angry, that I couldn’t even stand to be there. I didn’t want Kayla to see me. I couldn’t even talk to her or look her in the eye.
Then my memory blanks out.
What I do remember is the feeling. The putrid, black tar of my heart and soul, where the darkness had gotten in and spread like cancer. I remember anger and rage and paranoia and jealousy and everything else that hurts and cuts and kicks you to the core.
I know all of that must have been directed at her.
I’m beyond praying for miracles. I know she got the brunt of it.
I swallow painfully, my mouth like it’s filled with sawdust, and slowly ease myself out of bed.
I walk unsteadily to the door, the room tilting as I go. I pull open the double doors and peer inside the drawing room. There’s no one there except Lionel and Emily on the couch, on top of the extra comforter I usually keep at the end of the bed.
A flash comes into my mind, a fragment of a memory.
I remember getting up in the middle of the night, taking the blanket to her asleep on the couch and putting it over her.
I remember that.
The memory breaks me.
I have to suck in a long hard breath to keep a sob from escaping.
She wouldn’t even sleep with me last night.
And now she was nowhere to be seen.
I make my way into the hall, the bathroom, the kitchen.
It’s just me and the dogs.
Like it usually is.
Like it probably always will be.
Lionel follows me wherever I go as I look for her, showing me his loyalty. He only loves me because I love him but that’s all that I can get and it’s all that I can take. He’s a constant. He’ll never leave, even when he’s seen me at my worst too many times to count.
Emily is too new. She stays put, watching me warily. She doesn’t know me in and out yet. In many ways she’s like Kayla. Thinking she can trust me, hoping for the best. But this isn’t me at my best, this is me at my worst and what trust she had in me in shattering, slowly. I think Emily will come around, because I rescued her, saved her, because she is, in the end, just a dog.
But Kayla is infinitely more complicated. She’s a beautiful, caring, sexy as hell, multifaceted human being and I know I have hurt her in ways that are probably irreparable. She can’t be taught by conditioning, by rewards. Her loyalty isn’t infinite. She doesn’t provide love unconditionally because I’ve taken her in and offered her kind words. She’s someone I’ll have to spend my whole life trying to win over, to prove myself to, to constantly give my heart and soul to. There are no guarantees with love or life and her love is something I can never take for granted, if I’m even lucky enough to still be given it.
I search around the flat for signs of her. Her purse is gone but her suitcase and everything else is still here.
I have no idea where she’s disappeared to. I contemplate calling Brigs or even Amara, but I’m not sure how to explain myself. Of course I call her a few times but I’m put right through to voicemail. Even the sound of her cheerily sardonic message feels like a dagger to the heart and I’m bleeding all over again.