Saving 6: Boys of Tommen

She would never understand how it felt to transition from controlling your life with something you once enjoyed to becoming controlled by the very thing you now despised.

How did you justify addiction to someone who had never lived through it?

How was I supposed to make her understand that, for most of my life, I had been desperate to escape. That the only solace I’d ever been able to find had been in the soothing drag of a joint, or a mind-altering line of coke, in the numbing effect of benzos, or the thrilling buzz of uppers? How could I forget the euphoric fucking feeling of heroin?

Because Molloy didn’t know what it felt like to wake up every morning with a strong inclination to attempt suicide.

She didn’t know how it felt to be a helpless child, half-starved from hunger, and even more starved for a way out of a home she wasn’t wanted in.

She didn’t know what it felt like to be that hopeless kid who finally found something that helped him through the pain and sheer fucking misery that was his life.

And she had no idea how quickly the shift in balance had happened for that kid, how it had snuck up on him so unexpectantly.

She could never understand the excruciating self-loathing that came with the realization that the one vice that had once helped that kid make it through the day had silently morphed into something he couldn’t make it through a day without.

“Yes, really,” I snapped. “I really and truly despise the guy.”

For leaving me on my own in this.

For dropping the burden of responsibility on my shoulders when we should be sharing the load.

For snatching my future away from me when he walked out the door.