Alcohol Doesn't Really Solve Your Problems, It Merely Causes You To Disassociate

In Which, The Alcoholic Is Introduced

            Liquor. He wasn't quite sure how or when liquor had become the crutch it had become- only that he'd come to rely so heavily on it now that a day without it was... unbearable. Intrusive thoughts took sobriety as an invitation, filling his head with tangles of inky tendrils that tore him apart from the inside. He missed when his head was brimming with the galaxy- when closing his eyes brought visions of stars instead of...

Liquor. It was the only thing pushing him through the days now. Bottles littered the floor like a glass carpet, their clinking ringing in his sensitive ears as he trudged through them in the mornings. Every liquor from every brand, like a display, a grotesque collection. A tinted glass reminder of his own weakness and failure.

Looking at them sent nauseating waves of guilt and disgust through him, a sign of his sickness. He could clean them, spend an hour or so tossing the coloured bottles into bins and then dispose of them. But... he feared what he would find. How many bottles there would be. To see in such great detail how deeply destructive he'd allowed this to become.

So he opted to avoid them, to spend his nights in the beds of strangers where the bottles couldn't find him... Though, he always found the bottles. Wines and chardonnay when the strangers were classy, tequila and cheap beer when they weren't. It all tasted the same now, like regret and bitterness. If he tried, he could almost remember the individual flavours. Remember when wine was sweet on his tongue. Now the liquor seemed to linger too long. Coating his tongue like cheap candy and choking him with how it seemed to cling to his throat as he swallowed...

The beds... the beds had become monotonous too. Plush comforters no different to him now than dirty futons. Even the strangers had simply melted into the same faceless entities. Their hands, rough or smooth, large and small, all felt the same against his body. Every caress had been felt before. Even careless whisper or broken cry echoed the same in the walls that had blended together like a hazy drunken dream.

Or perhaps, nightmare.

"Silas."

The voice startled the young elf back into the moment, back into where he was sat on his nice plush couch, surrounded by bottles- another in his hand. Out of the void, where he'd been floating weightlessly, watching his thoughts tumble through the emptiness. How long had been zoned out? Too long if he heard that voice... but it felt like it wasn't long enough.

"I wish you'd stop doing that," his own voice sounded unfamiliar in his ears.

There was no reply, and he knew there wouldn't be- his apartment was empty. Just as it had been since the faceless stranger left the previous morning. Idly, Silas tried to remember the feel of their hands on his skin, to remember their face... but everything seemed to meld together into some amorphous creature with an all too familiar face. Had they been a man or a woman? Even that was foggy. Trying to focus on recalling brought crackling static to his ears though, so his attempts were quickly forgone and replaced with another mouthful of liquor.

It went down like water, tasteless and room temperature. But it curled in his stomach, unpleasant and boiling- but the pain was welcomed, if only as a distraction.

The couch was unwelcome and hostile territory now- and reluctantly he forced himself up from it and felt his joints crack and ache, damaged from the mistreatment and stillness. The muscles stiff and cramping. For a moment he wavered, unbalanced, threatening to tip over as his head spun- a sickening dizziness that tugged coldly on his stomach. A cacophony of sensations, none pleasant, taking over his all too narrow body.

But after a moment, however long it was, he steadied himself and the dizziness and pain subsided, leaving a ghost of their sensation.

By his feet, bottles clinked together, nudged aside and into one another as Silas took a few hesitant, then more confident steps across the room, to the window. Drawing the curtains aside felt like he was peeking into a world that he didn't belong in- a peeping tom looking over the lights of the city in their naked glory. The sky hadn't yet faded to darkness, but the summer sun was slowly crawling towards its bed hidden behind the horizon, blocked from his vision by the tall apartments that seemed to litter the city.

Hesitantly, Silas let himself dip onto the chaise that sat in front of the window, it's soft cushions welcoming him as he continued to look out over the sunset blanketed city, from far above it felt like. Like he was floating then in the sky, looking over this familiar, yet so horribly strange place. Beneath him, the lights glinted in arrays of yellows and oranges, flashes of lights passed by with the cars and the cellphones of the pedestrians on the sidewalks contributed to this great dancing light display like little stars, twinkling thousands of light years away- yet that light travelled all that way just to glint into his eyes.

His eyes sought the moon, but the glinting of the sun, still crawling sleepily down the sky, meant that the great white ball in the sky was rising behind him, just teasingly out of sight. But when he closed his eyes, he felt his body lift from the chaise and when he opened them again he was floating, basking in the glimmering light of thousands of stars. The moon sat just behind him, it's light enveloping his floating body and welcoming him. Its touch on his skin was cool, threatening to sap the warmth from his body, but it was calming rather than frightening. Among the stars, he could see the universe in its glory. The dancing of comets and the slow and unhurried crawl of asteroids... In the distance, bright coloured clouds swirled around stars, and as he drifted closer he could cup the stars in his hands. The moon, beautiful and glowing, watched him with the interest of an amused mother.