Sloppy Drunk

Note: This has nothing at all to do with my real life. It's just writing.

Sloppy Drunk

I sat still, very silent in my desperation, tucked away in the corner of our very dark kitchen, very far away from anywhere I would have liked to be. I let the tears freefall down my face and splash on the floor, eventually forming a little puddle on the dirty ground. And as I drew small circles in the dirt, I reflected that it seemed love was not at all what it was cracked up to be. He wasn’t a prince; I wasn’t a princess; there wasn’t a fairytale start; and from what I could see in the near future, there wasn’t a fairytale end in store for me, either.

Royalty aside, he didn’t treat me very well on the whole. He was out all day, and although I wanted to believe he was working hard to keep us together, I was forced to come to the conclusion that he drank, drank, drank his troubles away. This I was sure of, for the reek of alcohol stained his breath when he returned to our dingy little room I called a house.

When we eloped he had promised that the world out there was up for grabs and that he’d be the one to take it and serve it to me with lobster and caviar. I believed him. At the time, I said “I love you. I love you so much” and I really thought I did. Now, he tries to reassure me. “You still do. It only hurts because I’m right, and you don’t wanna except it. You still love me. I’m so right. So right.”

Confusion was the word of the moment. I had strong feelings for him, that was true, and they had to be somewhere on the spectrum between love and hate, but where exactly they were placed, I had no idea. This all became very clear one night, and this may show you why.

He stumbled through the door in the darkest part of the night: the time when the former day is giving way to a new one. I had always assumed it was the darkest at 12 AM because the two days were fighting for control and hadn’t time to turn on the lights. When their battle was over, I surmised, the victor cleaned up and re-lit the lamps.

Needless to say, he stunk badly of cheap liquor and I was immediately afraid of this man I pledged my soul to. I had reason to be scared, for more than once he had hit me in his drunken rage, oblivious to whom or as to why he wanted to harm. This particular night, he removed a pistol from his jacket with several choppy motions and pointed at me. Pointed at me and said “You’s too much bothers than ya worth” and he shot me right then.

I fell to the ground and watched the scarlet swirl around the bullet buried in my heaving chest. I began to wonder dimly if he had been right, if it only hurt because I still loved him. But this hurt, this was real pain. Horrible, unendurable pain was this gun wound. And then, suddenly, I realized what I had felt for him was not pain: it was regret. I regretted that I had ever run away with such a monster, that I had without a thought cast my bet in with a drunk. It didn’t hurt because he was so right. It hurt because I was so wrong.