October 18, 2003

2:08 am

You are the essence of my sobriety.

I have done so much to forget about you, but I realize I'm failing and losing myself in the process. The matter of the fact is, there are so many of you that hurt me, so I honestly don't know who I'm fighting against. It's like I'm on a battlefield, and I'm the lone warrior fighting against a hundred. I have nothing to fight with, and I'm up against people who have every weapon under the sun.

To break me mentally, they have embroidered on themselves whatever aspects of myself they've stolen. They flaunt the smile they have stolen from me, my laughter. They mock the time and effort I had once wholeheartedly invested into each and one of them.

I went down some dark paths to avoid that fight. I resorted to medicine that would make me feel real. I felt at peace. Once, I remember I reached my highest peak of euphoria and literally, nothing, mattered.

Rian. But, I saw my brother texted me, and when I scrolled through my message thread, I saw the emojis that I used for your name.

The first emoji is the girl in the red dress who seems to be dancing, and the other one is tornado emoji. They represent you all so much. I always found myself lost in the way that you, individually, moved me, but you left me in the same catastrophic state of depression, humiliation, and regret. Category 5 in all categories of pain.

So when I see these emojis, and all the other emojis in my message thread that represent such pain, even in my greatest state of euphoria, that I'm not high enough to forget that I lost your love. Well, you threw it away. It makes me wonder whether or not we shared the same meaning when we shared our first "I love you." I love you.

I loved you. It's funny how one small letter, "d", added to the back of the word "love" can change so much. This has honestly has to be the worst suffixation in the history of all languages. I really loved you. And for the others, the ones that I didn't fall in love with completely, because my mind and my heart were elsewhere: I had an abundance amount of love for you. I was so close to falling for you.

In my most intense state of euphoria, I am still consciously aware that it is after 2 AM, and I know that I have no one to call. The one I dream about is not dreaming of me. Even if they mastered the art of lucid dreaming, they would go out of their way to not dream of me.

You are the essence of my declination of an invitation to a party. Then you become the change of heart 3 hours later. You are the music that plays as I create havoc in my closet looking for the perfect outfit. You are the special juice I make while I wait for the Uber to arrive with my friends.

When I arrive to the party, you are the wall that holds me up as I watch my friends lose their morals on the dance floor. I see a face flicker in the darkness across the room as they frequently light up their lighter and inhale. You are the voice in my head that gives me the courage to go over and ask for a taste. The girl is pretty and she likes my shirt so she says yes.

At first, you were just the smoke that I exhaled out of my nose. But then you became pills. Pills of all different colors and sizes. You are the three pink ones with a star embedded on the front. You are the water that I swallow the pills with. The rest is a blur. There was a kiss. There was a pair of hands caressing my face. I thought she was you. I wanted her to be you. You became the blur that I lost myself in.

You are the cold shower I find myself in, with all my clothes on, on a Sunday morning, in a house that doesn't belong me. You are the Tylenol and the water I drink to relieve myself of my pounding migraine. You are the migraine. You are the confusion on my face when I go through photos taken on my phone of a night I have no memory of.

You are the essence of my sobriety.