The cost of Addiction

TW: Child abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, depression.

Rufus sat slumped behind his office desk. The clock on his wrist ticked by in a particularly agonizing way, yet not at all comparable to the agony he felt as to what had amounted to his pathetic life.

Divorced by thirty. A failed writer.

Abruptly, he let out a groan, attempting to pay more attention to the soft glow of his computer screen—one that had been both his saviour and his demise—instead of the sorrows within him.

Since he was a small child, practically before he could form a coherent thought, he had read. No, not by himself. Instead, by his mother, who carried such similar passions to those of Shakespeare. The way she would talk, the words she would form…Rufus was often amazed purely by her elegance. He had known he would be a writer then. A reader. Someone with more passion for breaking a rib than the torture of quadrilaterals.

And so it became. Writing was as familiar to him as his name.

For when Rufus wrote, he did not just tell the story. He felt it. The surprise of an unsuspecting character in an equally unexpected moment. The troubles of teenage love. The loss of parents. When his fingers clicked off the typewriter keys, he could live a thousand lives and be anybody he wanted. It filled him with something foreign to him nowadays: joy.

Joy, to Rufus presently, was like an old friend who forgot to visit, a presence so distant it haunted him. Depression, he had realized, was its cruel addictor.

Depression was like cocaine to him as alcohol was to his son.

The business proposal, he remembered, shaking his head of blond curls marked by age. It was an inconvertible truth that Rufus was not at all an old man. However, thirty-five years of stress can take a toll on one's body. He had always convinced himself he was okay.

The empty Word doc stared at Rufus. He imagined the blank page sighing in disappointment. He lightly pressed the cold keycaps with his fingers.

A few years ago, Rufus would not have had to wait a second before the letters flowed off his mind. Now, he was left with only the infuriating job of persuading ungrateful customers to purchase an item he himself was not incredibly fond of.

The Collon Cup is an undoubtedly advantageous investment. It is…

The start was decent. Workable. However, if he did want to continue his position at Collon & Co., he would have to come up with something better. Writing well is not always known to the normal eye. It had to be extraordinary, though how, he could not remember.

Rufus picked up his now completely cold coffee next to him. Good. He enjoyed it cold.

His blue eyes locked onto the black rim of the mug. His senses registered the dark, eerie atmosphere surrounding him.

No one was here.

An unwelcome thought rushed into his head. What if there was a boy, one in a forest, not different from this one? And, his two-year-old golden retriever ran off into the woods. He would leap into the ice-cold river, pieces of driftwood scattered around it. Perhaps he would slip on a mossy rock…

Rufus deleted everything he had stripped bare from his rebelling mind.

The wind practically wept, grieving the sorrow of the boy who would, in a short time, cease to exist.

A madman was born at that moment. The story wrote itself. Rufus was but a spectator watching the scenes of horror unfold. It brought back the bittersweetness of his writing days when not a single publisher would accept the novel he had sacrificed everything to write. Tears flowed shamelessly from his face that fateful day, five years ago. Something broke in the boy whose one dream was to make a person feel the love his writing held.

When he finished, he panted. You could have mistaken him for a marathon runner. Then, a slow, sly grin spread across his face. His blood burned through his body, but the kind that made you feel alive.

This was joy. It had finally come to visit. It felt almost as good as envy tasted to a woman fooling two men at once.

Rufus hurriedly packed his briefcase, annoyingly impatient to return home. He itched to write more, and a new idea began to form in his head.

******

The next morning was peculiar.

The entire night, he had stayed up. Stories upon stories finished drafting, and even before he hit save on his laptop, another thought arose. Rufus’s favourite, though, was one he had been inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book was his most beloved classic and the most enjoyable to write. A man who learned the curse of beauty, wishing it only upon his worst enemies.

But when Rufus rose to the mirror, preparing for work, something changed.

His eyes seemed larger, more…uncanny. His nose was unsettlingly crooked.

Shivers travelled down his spine.

God, those new meds are surely taking a toll on me, He thought. Better not to play into it, Rufus. Words are just words.

He marched out of the ensuite bathroom, smaller than most closets. The air around him smelled of whiskey. Hard. Rufus recoiled from the scent, gagging without meaning to.

A fire filled his soul. Rage blazed through his eyes.

“Thomas, I swear to all things holy, if you—” he started.

“Relax. It was a—” his eldest son put his index and thumb fingers apart barely an inch, walking towards his father in jagged lines. “Pinch.”

Rufus frowned. “You are going to kill yourself!”

“Aw, is daddy sad?” Thomas mocked nonsensically, “acting as if I should care. Mom left for a good reason, Rufus. You’re a screw up. A failure—”

“You do not talk to me that way!”

“And what are you gonna do? Write that in the book that amounted to nothing?…” Then, his son spat straight venom on the floorboards, in the form of vomit.

Rufus’s eyes glazed over. He ran to Thomas, wielding a bucket tortured with puke one too many times before. He patted his back, waiting for the rancid barf to cease. It never did.

Three long minutes later, Thomas crumpled into a mess on the floor.

“I got you,” Rufus whispered, joining him. An arm wrapped around his shoulder, Rufus held his eldest. Sobs shook from deep in his throat, like the wails of labour.

Finally, Thomas’s speech was rendered coherent enough to understand. “I did it again. I promised myself, Dad. I–I told Stacey I would quit, I—I.”

“Shh…It’s okay. We’ll try again, how about that, son? I’ll—I’ll help you any way you need. I promise. Don’t say things like that.” A lone drop of water fell down his cheek.

******

This time, when Rufus wrote, it seemed as if monsters painted the words.

He had never imagined himself a pessimist, though, if his thoughts had a journal, this is what it would be.

This story was about a woman. One whose laugh could brighten even the darkest of rooms, whose smile felt as if you were a planet revolving around the sun. The feeling was not at all a lie. For, if someone could be so well loved, it would be her.

One day, she met a man.

Just like anyone else, she rocked his lonesome world.

One day, the pair were—

“Declan. My office. Now.” A voice with a commanding edge sounded from behind him. Rufus flinched.

“Yes, sir.”

He cautiously followed his boss, a man with a junkie’s beard an angle’s face. Rufus counted his steps as he walked, breathing lighter as each one passed by. It. had been a habit of his since childhood. Whensoever the irritating sting of nervousness touched him, doing this soothed his overactive nervous system. The boss and the employee fell into a steady rhythm.

His boss let out a sigh, stretching so long Rufus wondered if it could have lasted all eternity. He sat at his large, ovular desk, composed of marble, gesturing for Rufus to come closer.

His heart sank.

He had never finished the proposal. Rufus would place no fault on his boss if he were fired at that very moment.

“Your mother has fallen ill. Suffered a stroke.”

“What?!”

His boss ran a shaky hand through his head. He had most likely forgotten he was bald.

If this were any other time, Rufus may have laughed until no one could stop him at the moment. Though unwelcome tears and a heart pounding more than he had ever thought ought to be possible were what met him. That, and shock. Waves flowed through him, such as water danced along the ocean. He had to sit down. No, he had to see his mother. But he felt lightheaded. Going to visit must be his only objective.

Instead, Rufus nodded. “Thank you for informing me.”

“No, no, Rufus. I told you this for another reason.” His boss looked up, eyes wide with something semblant of terror, “I came across one of your short stories. I suppose you typed up more than one last night. It…well, the circumstances were—”

“The very same.” Rufus finished quietly. “Excuse me.”

Before he could be excused, he sprinted so quickly out of the cold room that one could assume there was an imminent threat. No, Rufus thought, no imminent threat. I am the threat.

His parents and he had been in no contact for the past decade.

Rufus had not heard the soft voice of his mother; the words she provided became as desolate and limited as dust in a swimming pool.

Truthfully, he had written that story out of his mommy issues. He provided himself solace with the sole fact that, before her last words, she had once finally admitted that she loved her son.

Drugs can suck one’s soul. Unfortunately, many times the love surrounding the addict must pay.

He incessantly hopped into his car. Rufus turned the key, not wasting a second before zooming onto the shockingly unpopulated highway. Cars barked in agitation at his poor driving; however, Rufus did not, for even a moment, falter.

He pulled into the comfortable home of his childhood. It turned out to be nothing but a shed on the edge of an alley, in which he had lived cruelly and hopelessly.

“Mama!” He screamed, his eyes frantically searching for the blonde of her hair. “Mama!”

He knew she would be here. She was not well off enough to be admitted to the hospital.

Rufus’s mother was a character whose kind eyes could switch on and off. Her stories, her stories, they often bore a burning hole in his throbbing heart. For, through most of his childhood, drugs and whiskey were the way for his two parents.

He had not hated his mother and father. Not even once. Not even when the glass of alcohol bottles pushed into his skin because he refused to enable their addictions. Not even when they would be gone for days at a time, forcing Rufus to beg on the gray streets for food.

But, he had decided the worst was the slurs they would often throw at him.

As Rufus sat there now, panting in disarray, he recalled a sentence he had thought of earlier. ‘Words are just words.’

He knew now that not true.

Words cut deeper than the sharpest blade, until they have torn through every inch of skin to your bones. They are the sole commander for hurt.

In a way, Rufus felt as though his son’s alcohol addiction stemmed from knowing his grandparents. Perhaps, if he sheltered him from them, his fate would not be as bleak and desolate as it now looked.

Tears streamed from his eyes.

“Papa? Mama! Please, tell me you're alright.” He stormed into the miniature shed, looking around the place of his nightmares. Two small cots were pressed into the metal walls, opposite sides of the home. Neither belonged to him.

There was no bathroom, a fact Rufus had forgotten. They would urinate in a small, black bucket.

As Rufus turned to the one mirror in the home, he breathed in the scent of weed. His parents often did harder drugs than plain old weed, reaching for fentanyl and, on occasion, heroin as their form of satisfaction.

His eyes were purple. Rufus gazed into his reflection, watching purple pupils move from one place to another.

Terror filled his being.

Puzzle pieces on his mind began to click.

Whatever he wrote with passion turned true, but not without consequence. The stories seemed to come alive in the cruellest ways, twisting his intentions into suffering. He couldn’t control what was born from his words, only that it would live. And his face? Changes every time something becomes true.

“Mama, oh, there you are.” Rufus’s view latched onto the familiar grayish blonde of his mother’s long hair. She was sporadically shaking, as the needle in her arm continued to release doses of heroin, no doubt. As Rufus stalked closer, he noticed her dishevelled appearance.

She was once the most beautiful woman he had known.

Now?

Her eye bags were sunken and dark, her skin was littered with track marks in place of freckles. Her face was ugly. So ugly he could not look at her for another second.

She breathed. “Ruffy. There you are.”

Rufus swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yes, yes. I’m here now, Mama.”

His mother looked at him, “Listen, baby. I really need some money. Just a bit—”

“No, no, Mama. I can’t. You’re going to die! In this house! You have to stop.”

“You think I can stop now?” She bit back, “After twenty-five years?”

He scoffed, “Yes! Yes, you can. God, I’m surprised you haven’t overdosed yet…”

“You did this to me! If you weren’t born, I wouldn’t have been depressed, and I wouldn’t have gotten addicted!” She wailed as Rufus stood to return home.

Disappointment.

The only word he could use to describe the pain of mourning someone alive, but chose a slow death over the embrace of love.

Hope, Rufus had realized, was the most powerful motivation to exist.

Why was depression so potent in the minds of men?

Not because their bellies are full of both wealth and admiration. Not due to the problems they had to inevitably face, the hardships acting as roadblocks. Not even the hunger for something new, something different, blazing inside their souls.

It was hope. Hope that it could one day change. One day get better.

Strip man bare of hope, and they will immediately turn to grief.