Do You Know Him?

He's an alcoholic and a drug addict and he carries his demons under his shirt and close to his heart where they claw and rend and he bleeds out anger and hatred and misery and love.

He carries his demons close to his heart and inside his head and they whisper and taunt and tease and blend with the voices outside his head that tell him he's useless and worthless and wrong and bad and a drunk and no good and unwanted until it all turns into this big noise and the I Love You gets lost.

The I Love You gets lost because he isn't capable of understanding it, can't comprehend how anyone can look at him and his scars from the all the demon-scratching and his bleeding and anger and drinking and pot smoking and still say the words with meaning, even after he has spewed so much anger and bitterness out that they have coated everything, my heart, my soul, our home, his eyes and ears, and taken all the meaning out of his own i love you.

His own i love you has no meaning to him because he can't believe he has value, because he knows what he has done in this life and feels, behind the curtains of his eyes, deep in his mind, that he cannot have value because he has broken the law, broken hearts, broken vows, broken his word, broken himself down and down until he is tiny fragments, dust to be swept up and discarded.

He is dust to be discarded because that, in his mind, is all he has ever been.  In his mind, in his eyes, in his heart, in his experience, he has been tossed away like refuse when he turned out to be a disappointment, when his imperfections, so many imperfections, burst forth despite his best efforts to hide them and pretend to be the person he wants to be, and so tossed away he has drifted far from his better self and become this drunk addict who feels the scorn seeping through his walls and into his bones.

He is an alcoholic and an addict because he is trying to hide from, trying to buffer himself from, trying to resist what he thinks is real, that he is no good and no one could really want him and the hammer will fall, the shoe will drop, and he will once more be thrown out the door he is always halfway through.

He is halfway through the door because he has created a life that is untenable, taken the love he's been freely given and twisted it up, torn it to pieces, tossed it about, trampled it, all because he can't believe it is real and simply love and not some desire to change or turn him into what he isn't, that he can be loved for nothing more than himself and so must lash out at what he doesn't understand because love can't be love for its own sake but has to have a dollar value.

He thinks love has a dollar value because he has only felt loved when he was approved of, was only approved of when he had a job and was a good boy, did as others wanted him to, hid himself away behind blue eyes and a smile that never reached them.

When the smile reached his eyes, he was afraid, because that meant something more than a plastic existence of pretension, it meant he was opening himself up to an honesty for which he was not prepared, and that honesty burned and ate at him until he had to call it a lie, but in naming it a lie has only wounded himself more because he knows that the lie is truth and he can't hide from truth in the one place he wants to, inside his own head.

He can't hide from himself, and so...he is an alcoholic...and an addict...

And I love him.