Recovery

I remember parts of what happened last night after I finally got off the computer. More wine, more cutting, more bleeding. After using up all my drawing space between elbow and wrist, I moved up to my tricep and carved in DEEPER SOBER. It seemed the more drunk I got the more shallowly I cut and the less I bled, but I reversed that trend again with those words.

Kevin came home, left his things in the living room, and walked into the kitchen to greet me. It seemed to take him a minute to figure out what was going on...I was leaning against the stove, facing him, my left arm bleeding from shoulder to wrist, still clutching a bottle of wine in my right hand. I let it go without a struggle as he came alive again and ran to me.

"What happened?" he asked, grabbing my shoulders. "What did you do? What did you do?!"

I couldn't explain, just melted down into tears. I remember him telling me to sit down on the hassock, and him sitting on the chair facing me with a roll of paper towels and a plastic container full of water. He tried to clean my arm with wet paper towels, then realized it wasn't going to work and brought me upstairs. He washed off my arm in the shower, then got out a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

"This is going to sting," he told me, soaking another paper towel. I nodded numbly, then started to cry again as he rubbed it over my arm and into my open cuts. "Shh," he said, and the pain went away. He found a bandage bigger than any I've ever seen and taped it on my arm; it covered me from elbow to wrist. A smaller one covered the words on my upper arm.

Next thing I remember we were curled up together on the big squishy chair in the living room. The first part of the conversation is lost in the mists of alcohol, but after a while the room stopped spinning, and I was crying again. Kevin might have been too; I don't remember. We talked about my dad and my mom, about his parents, about things that happened to us when we were young and things that happened to us later in life, about how all of those things can shape who you are in so many different ways.

Although I've poured out much of my own story here, I don't feel right sharing what it was that happened to him...but it was one of the worst things that can happen to anyone. I knew about it already, but there were parts of the aftermath that he hadn't shared with me before. About the kid at school who found out and tortured him mercilessly for five years before Kevin finally snapped and beat him nearly to death.

It felt like hours that we spent curled up there while the world slowly came back to me. It probably was, because by the time we finally wandered into the kitchen to make mac 'n' cheese it was very late. Haven not eaten all day and being very hungover by then, I still managed to stuff down two bowls. At some point I grabbed a glass of water that was on the table and polished it off, then moved on to the container that had been intended to clean my arm and drank that too.

This morning I accompanied Kevin on his weekly work-trip across the state so that we could come back by way of a poker room. The poker room turned out to be closed, but I didn't mind. By that point I just wanted to be home so I could curl up on the couch and drink tea. I was actually grateful that it was chill and rainy today, because no one could question my decision to wear a long-sleeved shirt.