Addiction

When I was five I watched my uncle drown himself in alcohol. I watched as it consumed him, lost in a deadly substance but too blinded to see what it was doing to him.

When I was eleven I watched the police hold him down, trying to control him after he swallowed one too many pills, morphing him into someone else completely. I saw the way his hooded eyes gazed at me with a vicious tint and his slurred words held only venom.

At fifteen I watched through tear-filled eyes as he screamed at me, his words deadly and his tone terrifying. My heart hurting as someone who was supposed to love me only showed hatred.

I promised myself, somewhere between my mother's tears and the heart-dropping phone calls, that I would never become him. That I wouldn't allow addiction to grab ahold of my life like it did his.

Seventeen years old and now I understand why he did it. It's the need to forget, to feel something other than pain even if it's just for a few hours. It's a cry for help, a way to escape, and though I never fell for the charms of a bottle of alcohol or a container of pills, I'm beginning to realize addiction comes in many different shapes and sizes.

Like the boy at the back of the class and the sound of his laughter, rich and warm and all too perfect. Or lying my head on his chest, becoming mesmerized by the thump thump of his heart against my ear. The way his gaze intoxicates me more than any alcohol ever could - Ruining and healing and leaving me wanting all at the same time. Or maybe the way his presence might as well be a drug by the euphoric-like high it leaves in it's wake.

How when he left it was as if I was going through withdrawal, pins and needles licking my body as I cried out for him to come back. How years later I still yearn for him every single day, every single minute, every single second. How nothing will ever truly live up to the feeling he gave me, how nothing has been like it since.

Maybe I didn't end up like my uncle but maybe being addicted to another human is just as dangerous.