Halfway Home

C/W: Addiction, suicide

Halfway Home

Levi adjusted the rearview mirror first. The adjustment pooled a Cambridge apartment complex, boasting an eternal triptych conglomeration of conformity and gentrification, onto the plastic. He scoffed, as rehearsed, at the American idealism painted into the singularity, suffering only three hues of beige and an inexpensive white for the shutters. The homes have manicured shrubs where his has locked bars; the side panels are painted ballet slipper pink, where his are lattice-worked fire escapes.

Secondly, Levi twisted the ignition with an ironic smirk at the early hour and his car's metallic crunch. He imagined the pale blonde wives twitching in their nested sleep at the noise, and the other hive-like residents waking with complaint. The street was almost alive, and the Mass Avenue tent-dwellers were starting their walks toward the Methadone clinics. For an irrational moment, he worried that his car had disturbed Rory, who lived streets away in her Harvard dormitory.

He met Rory at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting as she claimed her six months chip, and he smelt of well-water drinks from Dillions. She had those sort of guarded-curious eyes like a rocket out of orbit. He would lose many thoughts when staring at the hazel orbs. Cluttered, neurotic, emotional, brilliant: her voice ebbed and flowed with a yes/no certainty that confused her interlocutors. The first time she called Levi, using the crumbled back of a receipt, she was sobbing that her thoughts were stuck in "Williams" and "Plath" syntaxes and she didn't know what to do. He rarely understood her and liked that part the most.

When Levi was in eighth grade he stole a candy jar of benzodiazepines from the unkempt medicine cabinet in his mother's bathroom and drove down to a pond to die. That was his intention, anyway. But, as he wafted inside the brown, lapping water, and untidy, obsidian-black hair ebbed and flowed with the wind's pushing tides, he felt unadulterated joy for the first time in his life.

He had lain all afternoon in the pond with emergent weeds and yellow irises. The water dripping into his ears and nourishing his parched brain as his lips turned from pink to blue, and his submerged fingertips a siren-blue, too.

Some sunset jogger had called the ambulance, and as doctors pressed Flumazenil into his veins and performed sternum rubs until the nasal air-tubes were pressed, Levi awakened to decided that his life was movie. Surreptitiously deterministic and indeterministic, with a fixed set of cast and crew members, that he could rewind the tape on a rewatch at any moment. He shed the frightful fatalism—absconding himself of responsibility or purpose—and found drug-induced near-suicide the best alternative to suicide. Living his life outside the reality it was composed within.

He reached into his glove department to crack open an Olde English forty-ounce, and place four Xanax milligrams onto his twenty-two year old tongue. The morning dew hung on his window like tear drops, and blurred the apricot nectar, golden bell, and sea breeze teals into a portrait of morning. He understood his the broader endgame of his life, but he did not expect Rory's entry and it disturbed him.

It had been this last relapse that hurt Rory the most. She stayed by during the others, believing in his recovery and every lie he told her. Either the early hour or hangover or both made his memories dimly lighted, diaphanous, and sentimental. This one he had told her they were through, which he never had done before. It was one of their promises: I'll stay until you ask me to go. On day three in his detox, he would realize it was the first time he had not called Rory the first time he was offered the phone. He would realize their relationship was over without calling her to hear it aloud.

He crossed over the Boston bridge and headed toward the attention deficit and hyperactive high way, reaching in his threadbare pocket to light a Newport between his lips. This time will be different, Levi thought, as he shook another swig of near-empty bottle.

Scintillating shards of a glass menagerie outshone the background music of either Mac Miller or J-Cole. His mother was perpetually absent, which almost-absolved her of the ways his step-father would lock him in the basement closets while she was away. When he hung himself two years after Levi's overdose, he used the same belt that he would whip against Levi's back. He never knew his father so when the kids on the street called him a "Bastard" he swung with all his hurt at this unsuspecting faces.

The houses his mom occupied with her boyfriends did not interest him, and the only homes he considered his were Rory and drugs. Concepts rather than places, which he ignores. He only knew what he learned and he was aggressive and careless and rude while drinking or drugging. The family spent their energy on Levi's well-being, and his little brother grew up watching him chose drugs over him, wondering if he hurt at all.

But drugs were his euphoria. He had not tasted happiness before them, falling into the Alice rabbit hole into a chamber of dizzying pink bliss, with a sky that gleams into a smile with a navy backdrop and golden stars. In the chamber he felt like he was joining hands with the universe.

And he would always love Rory but when it came to euphoria or Rory, there was not a question. The addict brain spoke so eloquently with poignant arguments that had to be true: She will always forgive you at some point, you can make this up to her later, she is against you, she does not love you, and she wants to tear us apart, forever.

The pond had a lifeguard-red sign now: No Swimming. 

Addicts hate the thought of forever, and it's a common notion that non-addicts use: "Never touch alcohol again." It is terrifying because addicts largely equate peace and equilibrium with their drugs of choice. Thus, it is the equivalent of saying, "Never feel peace or equilibrium, again." It is also the dopamine levels, and the nature-nurture debate, but above all it is a disease: the only one that tells the afflicted that they are not diseased.

Levi thought poetry was found at the bottom of a bottle, and that epiphanies sparked in tabs of LSD and cocaine lines. This genre of poetry was safe, the love-and/or-oblivion kind. Nights preceding his scheduled re-entry into another New England detox were spent in solitude breathing in future nostalgia that queued another relapse. This time he drove himself and justified packing six forty-ounces with a mantra of ‘last time.’

When he was half-way home he felt the descent into his father’s footsteps, attempting to find in escapism what was hidden in realism. Levi continued to travel for a great deal, as if another thought would write itself along his brain to erase the previous one. The rearview mirror trembled like a ghoul being shoved back into its grave, a grave that was permanently sealed six-feet-under with an anonymous headstone. Years later he will claim to anyone who is still listening that he wanted to stop, and was going to, but the howls of the ghoul and impending nostalgia rang like bullets next to his temple. 

He skids into a small town that appears familiar enough to be welcoming, and runs into the nearest bar. It was 3:00 o’clock and the bar was mostly vacant apart from a pot-bellied Italian, who—if drawn into an animation—could be the face of a wood-fired pizzeria. His eyes pass the lighted row of colored glasses, tiny transparent bottles in delicate marketing colors, like bits of an exotic, sea-glass rainbow. 

“What can I get you started with?” The blushed cheeks asked. 

“One pint of Miller, and a shot of whiskey,” he experienced a total power exchange in saying those words: trusting in the fulfillment of his request. Because—albeit he would not admit to himself, his therapist, or girlfriend—he loved alcohol and drugs more than anything or one. Perhaps the drugs were akin to a familiar beat of his heart. Perhaps it was only the silenced mind and amplified euphoria. Perhaps he preferred walking into dimly lit bars with alternative rock radios playing, in some strange maybe-city, where everything was already decided. Maybe he did not know that he loved his addiction more than the flesh and blood and dreams he held, but he sought it like a lost boy wandering the night streets looking for home. 

“Here you are,” the man had no tattoos and this made Levi distrust him. 

“Should I keep the tab open or—”

“Keep it open,” he said as he swallowed the first shot. 

A lemony woman with a trembling voice and aura of a late spring evening took the seat next to Levi, breathing the aftertaste of Marlboro reds into his eyes as she spoke, “Has anyone ever told you, you are dashing?”

A question absent inflection. It felt more like an invitation, to be flirted with and have eyelashes dangled in front of his lips. She smelt sour, and her skin revealed the distance of time she had traveled. He just looked at her and laughed— refusing responsibility. There was something about Levi that most women automatically loved. Maybe it is because the almond shape of his navy-ship eyes mysteriously defied a plea for pity, yet the bait was still there. These paradoxes he wound into, which aligned with the predestination-slash-free-will internal debate he argued, aligned with the majority of his patterned behaviors. 

She placed her finger, with a nail as acrylic and long as a cabaret singer, on his lips and traced their curvature. She smiled as she poked closer into his mouth, and pulled back as soon as his interest spiked. He knew without thinking that she was one of those women who drifted through the world, the type that people call home girls, and are pitied by outsiders who cannot sympathize with her plight. 

“Another for the man,” she insisted to the bartender, and pushed at the top of her Ravenclaw hair to jostle her dead-brown eyes. Levi became restless: the type that had finalized his mother’s emancipation from him, and the type that he knew drove his father away when he was a child. It was the restlessness that Rory forgave when he promised her to be better, typing fiberglass lies on his way to the liquor store or Massachusetts Avenue. He tore through the skin where his fingertips ought to be, and drew blood on his lips, before engulfing the third and fourth drinks. 

He backed toward the door, both the man and woman watching him, in a surreal state where neither seemed bothered by his egress, despite a bill not being paid and a sexual obligation not being fulfilled. Levi could only see himself through the wrongs he committed to others, even when conjuring up some sort of wrong begged the irrational. It was a pantomime moment, and he felt as he jostled the keys to his car that the glass had metaphorized into the sound-proof type during his brief departure.

He slammed his foot against the gas. It was not the woman or the bar that sent him into this state but rather as he felt as though a curtain was rising, and the audience in his movie was being faced with the dark, grim reality that Levi was stuck. Stuck his whole life. He pressed numbers into his phone: Mom, Rory. 

“You have to let me come back. I can’t, I-I-I-I can’t stay here. I swear I will be better, I swear I will be better.”

Maybe the rejection from Rory—“If you are not recovering you are dying,” she curtly states, and then hangs up the phone—hurts the most because it was the only time they had shared a call under a minute. The next intrusive thought is entirely memory and is therefore an apotheosis of subjective conjecture. He had called Rory the other night, and told her he l0ved her by saying that she did not love him. He threatened his life—no, no, NO, NO—Levi slammed on the breaks, banging a loud left. She called someone, she called someone to help—no, she called someone because her little Ivy League persona couldn’t survive if her boyfriend just ODed on something—and poetically licensed his way around culpability until he was heading straight toward Cambridge. 

He felt the childish urge to drown and continued drinking the bottles hidden around his car. Memory resides in the heart, and his mind knew that he was in trouble, but his heart was bleeding ways to ignore the first-step of any twelve-step program. He was accidentally ignited with the implacable fire of human desperation: for love-and/or-oblivion.

The interior of the car was dim, and he saw as he was half-way home that he had few options. The cat’s cradle lattice-work of the fire-escape into Rory’s dorm was not an option, even if she found it grim and poetic. As he rose over the Boston bridge he felt flanked by both sides of the barriers, romanticizing the moments of drowning in No Swimming zones. 

He twisted back ways and tunnels, swerved and side-scraped middle-fingering corporate Americans, and went up and down the alleys as the Bars hangover made his eyes soften, and the alcohol began to taste dry in his mouth. His mom had shouted to all the neighbors that he was leaving for rehab today, as if she had performed some Christian exorcism on their nerves. 

And he descended the potholes and construction signs, pulling toward his driveway, to find his mom and flavor of the mouth outside with a man who drove, supposedly, a white van. His two little brothers, the twins,—Charlie and Oliver—wrapped their three year old arms around his mother’s waist, and she pet their heads as if she had recently won Mother of the Year. 

“Oh, Mom, Mom, I tried to go, believe me, but I think I really need to be back home. I can’t go to another place like this again. Mom, MOM, Mom. Are you listening? Mom I’m fucking fine, I’m fucking FINE.”

She turned to him with eyes glassed like melting ice, “Levi, I know this is your home. I did not call them, Rory did.”

Then all at once the man with the van touches his shoulder, and he turns around and looks into his eyes, “C’mon kid.”