Empty

I had a rough time when I came home. My wife wanted me to talk to her about it, but I couldn’t.

My buddy, back in Iraq... he was shot in the head and she’s telling me to talk, to chat with her about it like it’s a fucking… I don’t know, like it’s something I could forget. 

She didn’t get it, she couldn't understand that talking about it makes it… real.

I thought about killing myself. Of course I did. My men were dead and my leg was blown off by the same fucking IED that killed them. 

But you know what the real kicker was? I still came back home. I lost a leg sure, but I was alive. How was I supposed to feel? Happy? Blessed? Grateful? When all I can think about is why I survived, what made me so fucking special?

The doctor gave me opioids for the pain. Phantom pain, he called it. I said, frankly, I didn’t care what it was called, but I needed something, anything to take the edge off. 

They helped, I guess. Only so much. I still couldn’t sleep and there was the train. There were train tracks behind our house, you see, and it would come through at odd hours of the nights. The rumbling, it sounded like explosions, like gunfire and I-- I would freak out, grab my gun. It scared her, my wife. I scared her. 

I think she thought that maybe I would hurt her or the kids or… I never would, but I can imagine, how she felt. I know it must've been scary. I was in a really bad place.

Anyway, that’s probably around when the drinking started. At first I drank to sleep, to black out, so I wouldn't hear the train. Then I was drinking to pass the time, numb the pain in my head. Now I’m drinking just to get by, to make it through another day... another hour... another second. 

I spend most of my time in the bars downtown nowadays. My wife used to call, beg me to come home. She would cry and it broke my heart every goddamn time, listening to her cry over the phone. She even got me to go to AA a couple of times. I got sober for a little while, for her.

But my wife and I, we were fighting everyday about my not being able to get a job, my drinking, the kids, you name it. We were fighting a lot, you know, and we weren’t intimate anymore so I was… I was lonely, I guess, and I was hurting. So I turned to the bottle.

My daddy was an alcoholic, you know. And I hated him when I was a kid. I hated the ugly man he was when he was drunk. He would hit my mama, you see, and he would… well, I guess nowadays you would call it rape, what he did to her every night. And I hated him, you know. For putting my mama and me through that. Every single fucking night.

He served too, you know. Back in Vietnam. 

He was never the same.

I wasn’t the one who found her. My son, he… I was at the bars all day, as usual, so I wasn’t home. His mama put him and his baby sister down for a nap around three in the afternoon. He woke up an hour or so later to his sister crying, just bawling, right, and his mama wasn’t-- he wondered why his mama wasn’t waking up, his sister was right there, after all, in the crib right next to the bed and he went into the room to see what was wrong. His sister was there in the crib, red-faced from crying, but his mama, she wasn’t getting up, she wasn’t moving, she-- He’s just a kid, but my son, he’s smarter than his daddy ever was, and he called 911, just like they taught him in school.

I got to the emergency room and the doctor, he came over to me, said my name. Everything was so blurry and the lights were fluorescent, you know, they were too bright, they were hurting my eyes and my head was just pounding like a mother… but I heard him. Loud and clear. I heard him say it and it was like a clap of thunder. 

I heard him say overdose.

That’s when I knew. I just knew. 

I knew it was my fault.

She had a history of depression, you see, from before we were married. She was having some... some symptoms again. She started self-medicating with the stuff I got, you know, the stuff I got from the doc. For my leg. I guess ’cause they were there, you know, she didn’t want to worry me or the kids, she just took a few here and there, to get through another day. You know, just here and there.

I was always worried about... about myself. My own pain and my own problems instead of-- 

God help me. I did, I did notice, she was always calling my scripts in before I needed them, always offering to pick them up for me, but I was too busy fucking drinking until I passed out every fucking night and day. I could've helped her, I could've... I could've saved her. 

The kids live with her parents now. I miss them, but I… with how I am now, it’s for the best.

I miss her too. I miss her every goddamn hour of my life. You know, the funny thing is, it's always the little things you miss the most. Like the way she held her coffee cup. The way she was always humming along to a song in her head. 

I’m tired of missing her.

I killed my wife. I killed my fucking wife, the woman I love more than anything in this goddamn fucked up world. And for what? For a fucking drink, that’s what.

Now I have nothing left. I have nothing left.

God dammit. I need a drink.

Just one drink.