The Alcoholic - 2

He stirred from his stupor, eyes darting left, right, down at himself. He was lying on pavement next to a rusty dumpster. He wondered what the yellow sludge streaking down the side of the container used to be. His back hurt and he couldn't feel his legs. They were numb, probably from laying there too long. He didn't know where he was or how long he'd been out. Had he been dreaming of Amanda? A shadowy image of her flitted through his sodden mind then was gone. Replacing it was a familiar thought, the one that dominated during his waking hours. "I need a drink."

As he struggled to scoot up further on the wall against which his upper back and head had been smeared, he scraped the knuckles of his right hand on the pavement. His knuckles took the brunt of his weight and his hand was wrapped around the neck of an empty bottle. He lifted the bottle closer to his face and squinted his bleary eyes at the label. Husky Corn Whiskey. Vile stuff, but cheap. Apparently it did the trick. He tossed it aside, much like the booze had tossed aside his life, worthless and useless to anybody now.

He had to end this, but had never found the courage. It was much easier to reach once again into the oblivion of the next bottle than it was to actually kill himself with the finality of a violent act. He had a vague hope of combining the two ideas but he needed to get his hands on some cash. He'd never robbed anybody yet, but today that would change. He didn't care anymore, had lost his last shred of self-respect weeks ago. Get money. Get enough drink. Drink enough before passing out to slip into the final darkness from which he'd never awake. Good plan.

He somehow managed to get on his feet and stumble out of the narrow alley onto a wide city sidewalk. People strode past, in a hurry to reach their jobs, their buses, their stores, their families. He was a ghost to them, a non-entity that nobody appeared to see. He almost felt that they would walk straight through him if he stepped out into their path. He began to scan the passersby for his mark. Within minutes, his eyes landed on a young, petite brunette who skittered past him nervously. She briefly glanced his way, a look of nervous tension in her eyes and a quickening of her step. He waited a moment for her to pass then stepped out into the stream of people and followed her, concentrating his will on keeping his eyes focused on her pink hair tie that bobbed in and out of his line of vision through the people separating them.

The Alcoholic - 1

He stared at the bottle in his hand and wondered why he was still alive. Hadn't he endured enough at the hands of his addiction? The first thing he lost was his job, his exodus foreshadowed by a short but awkward conversation with Kelly, his fat, round-eyed supervisor. Soon after, his wife moved out, taking their six-year old daughter Amanda with her. "I love you, but I just can't allow us to continue to be hurt like this," she had said, her eyes dry and deadened. She didn't cry over her broken husband and decimated marriage anymore. She just felt tired and hopeless, beyond the emotional outbursts that had characterized her in the past several months.

Not long after that, his mortgage foreclosed and he was out on the street. Out on the street. He'd heard the term plenty of times before, but the reality of it was so much different. So desperate, so lonely, so indifferent. He had nowhere to go, nobody who cared and no reason to live. He stared at the bottle in his hand and wondered if he could scrape together enough money this week to buy enough booze to terminate his misery. How had it gotten this bad? Why couldn't he drink like everybody else?