Sometimes he felt like he was suffocating. Drowning in an ocean of murders and unsubs.
Sometimes he felt like he was choking, on the mudhoney and death that was all around him. That he felt everyday.
Sometimes he felt smothered. Under a damp blanket, with his eyes yearning for life and his lungs yearning for breathe. Sometimes he felt like he was falling, into a deep bottomless pit, slowly.
He felt it, and could never shake it off.
He told himself: but I've been through this before. I shouldn't have to face this again.
But again. After so long, sober, clean, the craving was there again.
Some Kind of Relapse.
And it put his head spinning backward and gave him a sick feeling in the center of his gut.
He awoke.
The Sunlight Streaming through the curtains reminded him that he was alive. And he rose off the pale sheets to stumble into the bathroom.
Looking at himself in the mirror reminded him of just haw horrible he looked.
He had a beard beginning; his hair was ratted, tangled into a mass of a thousand knots.
The deep circles and horribly dead eyes that hung above them reminded him of what a bad, bad person he had been.
He couldn't those faces out of his head.
He couldn't stop hearing their voices repeating their calm, soothing words over him in a hospital bed. He told himself over and over that he would not let it get to him, that after the chaos of being rescued, the horror and madness that was the aftershocks of his unwanted medication. He told himself he would not be addicted. He would not fall into that quagmire, but he was wrong.
So Horribly Wrong.
So there he stood with the needle in his hand, stealing himself for the prick. The Sting.
How familiar and terrible it had become, when the drug rushed into his veins and his body lifted into transcendence and misery.
He knew that this was all a hoax, even when you are high, he told himself, and you cannot escape your own pain. Moving in his proverbial haze, he moved through the day, quiet, introspective and missing.
At lunch he sat at his desk, staring blankly at the wall and letting his thoughts wander in circles, repeating those words he had heard, wishing he could remember what they said when he asked them how to stay sober.
For the first time in his life all his theories deserted him, and no science or philosophy could get him out of this bind.
The first time, He had sat through therapy and blabbering psychologists who told him the twelve steps to change, that he would never be cured from the disease, just recovering. That he needed to stay away from situations where he could hurt himself, or fall back into the vicious cycle. Somehow he failed to make sense of anything anyone was thinking, and his brilliant mind was clouded and hazed in.
He saw her staring at him, with her blonde hair surrounding her shoulders like a halo, her eyes were sad, and he looked up and his voice rasped when he asked JJ what she was looking at.
She said that she wasn't looking at anything.
"JJ, I know you were looking at me." Oh her eyes grew even sadder, and he was starting to worry that she might cry.
He had found that he could not stand to see anyone cry anymore. It was too challenging to see someone burst out with the very emotions he was suppressing with the drugs.
With his own bittersweet addiction.