sink or sink.
he coughed and coughed and churned his insides with inhaled cigarette smoke. his throat was a chimney. his lungs were a vacuum. he lied on the couch, an island surrounded by a sea of crumpled tissues with bits and pieces of dried out lung buried inside.
“you don’t want to live like me,” he said with a sigh that turned every color gray.
i nodded and looked up and scanned the room. the once white wallpaper was now the color of week-old coffee grounds, and it was peeling from the ceiling. the walls were knotted like the trunk of a tree. the furniture looked like it had half-heartedly been salvaged from a fire. he was right. i didn’t want to live like him. i didn’t want my furniture to be gutted like a hunted animal.
another sigh.
“i spent so many years in regret. you don’t know what that does to a man until it’s too late.”
there was nothing i could really say. i felt like i needed to say something, anything, to, i don’t know, maybe make him feel like he hadn’t wasted his life, but i couldn’t. i couldn’t lie like that. i couldn’t. think. of. a. thing.
“she left me 17 years ago. i’ve been on this couch for 16 of those.”
i could tell.
“i can’t say that i blame her,” he continued. “i drank and i drank until i could tell her i loved her. that was the only way that i could.”
it was hard for him to complete a sentence without stopping between words to expell some more lungs or some other piece of his god-awful, blackened insides.
“why didn’t you love her when you were sober?” i asked.
“why does man drink?” he replied.
i was surprised, to say the least, at his off-putting reply. i thought, “this is not a lesson on the socratic method.” i really had no idea how to answer that.
“why does man drink?” i just repeated his question, only with different emphasis. “to escape reality?”
“no,” he said. “man drinks to forget.”
“then why did you have to drink to love?”
“i had to forget who i was, the things i’d done, just to be able to love,” he said, heaving and coughing into a new tissue.
i didn’t understand. maybe because i had no comprehension of his life. maybe because i had no idea what it was like to spend 17 years killing myself from the inside out.
i only knew what it was like to spend two years killing myself from the inside out.
we sat in silence for what seemed like an entire year. i kept my hands clasped with my elbows on my knees and my eyes staring down at the floor.
“we’re not too different,” i said. “you had to drink to love. i have to be under the covers to love.”
“that isn’t the same,” he said. “you can still feel something. feeling something is better than not feeling anything at all.”
he was right. i guess i was just trying to placate him.
he repeated himself in a groaning, spitting sentence. “you don’t want to live like me.”
i looked at him in agreement, but we both knew that i already was and there was nothing either of us could do to stop.
neither of us cared enough to fix anything.
