Tw: Alcholism - Blog Posts

Alcoholic Belos real!?

I am completely not normal about Love for Love's sake.

It brought up so much pain, so much emotion and trauma that I'd buried deep inside for the sake of my sanity. It opened up this small chest of sadness I carry with me at all times, and all of the things I thought I had worked through spilled out. Tae Myung-ha is a character I relate to on such a visceral level, from his perpetual weariness to his self-destructive tendencies. I relate to feeling like you're older than everyone else around you, like you already know better, like there is no point in trying.

In the very first scene we already get the feeling that something is wrong with Myung-ha. That question from Sunbae - I swear to god, I've had people say the same thing to me, and I answered in the same dismissive and sarcastic tone. Yes, I am drinking like I want to die, but, unfortunately, it's not working. So I'll go on drinking like that to see how far I can go before I keel over.

When my girlfriend said she loved me for the first time, I held her and caressed her cheek but I was screaming internally. I was doing my best not to run away. I swear to god I could hear the error alarm going off in my head. I accepted the fact that her and I have very differing views on what love is, and I tried so hard to prove to her that she didn't actually love me, that it was just infatuation, that it was too soon, that she was yet to know the real me, so she couldn't love me, right? Then I realized that I was hurting her, because throwing someone else's feelings in their face is a cruel thing to do, especially to my girlfriend, who has issues with expressing her feelings.

I still don't believe her. And I am trying so hard to accept the fact that people love me in the way they do.

One of my friends once told me that I needed to rely on others, that she loved me and cared for me, and that I needed to accept that. Refusing to accept someone's love for you can be just as hurtful as not being loved at all. Other people love you, and it's important to show them you appreciate their love.

He doesn’t know what to make of it.

It’s ugly and it’s not, it’s beautiful and it’s not, it’s simultaneously everything he could have wanted and everything he dreaded.

She was leaving him.

She was leaving him, and wasn’t that fantastic? Wasn’t that horrible? Wasn’t that everything he could think of, alone but together with himself and a bottle that he could’ve sworn had fused to the callouses on his fingertips, had been superglued there and never ever left.

She was leaving him.

He still had his wedding ring, stuck to his finger in a different way than when you try on a ring and have to take it off with soap and water and time. It was stuck by the adhesive of his own mind. Trapped. He couldn’t take it off, couldn’t bare to pry it away.

She had taken hers off long ago, so why was his still stuck, like the bottle to his callouses and to his lips and permanent streams of saltwater that clung to his cheeks for days and days and days? Why?

All of his breaths were shudders and all of his thoughts were endless strings that never had a conclusion, an essay with an infinite word-count. He could still see the amber spilt on the floor through watery eyes, and still found it ironic that he was back to crying over spilt milk and spilt Jack Daniels and spilt tears and he was crying over everything and nothing and whatever was in between, so why did it matter anyways?

He clenched the bottle even tighter in his hand, and he wasn’t sure how much of it was alcohol and how much of it was his own tears at this point, and he knew he had to stop.

He had always known he needed to stop. He knew he needed to stop the first time he took a secret sip from beer in the fridge and the first time he had a serious hangover and the first time and the first time he met her and the first time she left him and the first time she came back and the first time she left a second time.

So many firsts. To him, the milestones didn’t matter a single bit. To him, all that mattered was that he didn’t have to care about what really did matter. And he was incredibly proficient at that in particular.

So he was good at knowing when to quit, but he was never quite as good at quitting. He was still stuck on that one time she smiled at him and she had looked so genuine, so real, and how she had looked just as real and tired when she said that she wanted a divorce and that she had had another.

She had another, didn’t she? Of course she did, she was always good at back-up plans and back-up-back-up plans. He knew it when she had a beer spilt on her shirt that neither of them liked (like the Jack Daniels on the floor and the milk knocked over to the ground and his heart to hell fires). He knew it when she came home with her lipstick smeared and with her eyes wild, he knew it when she stopped looking him in the eye and started looking at the wall behind him.

(The last time she looked him in the eye she told him straight to his face that she had another.)

(The last time he looked her in the eye he didn’t say a word.)

He stood up and slipped on the whiskey and prayed to whoever was out there that he wouldn’t be able to get up. It didn’t work.

It never worked, did it? Whoever was out there doesn’t care much for people like him anyway, and he could hear in the back of his head the whisper screams of ‘alcoholic’ and ‘acute mania’ his own screams weren’t loud enough. The shards of the bottles scattering everywhere when he smashed them to drown them out hid under his couch and beneath the coffee table to escape him and he understood why, because he was running from himself too, like her.

He didn’t know if there was a God anywhere.