ALEXANDER 1.5
PART 5: Shame.
“Blaming you, you should know, is the result of restlessly collaging you excuses and arguments,
I am your best lawyer in a court against me, my feelings, and my anger.”

He walked inside the emergency room, stumbled upon the receptionist’s desk, lifted his heavy head, and with his bright red eyes asked to see a doctor. Seeing the sweat under his eyes, the short and suffocated breaths he let out, the receptionist called the first nurse on duty.
As he lay on his hospital bed, the young man stared at the ceiling while the screams of the next-room patient made a strangely pleasant background noise to his dramatic misery. You’d think he was suffering, but at that precise moment, intoxicated, tied to tubes, and trapped in an emergency room, Alexander was euphoric. This was the high he’s chased for years, the brief moments of forgetting why he even started doing what he did, a sort of escape, although temporary, was what he needed the most.
Under the influence of a cocktail of drugs, Alexander walked through the snow while the laughter and bright lights inside his head intensified. He knew he wasn’t crazy, he just had too much to drink, too much to smoke, and even more pills swallowed than he could count. At some point in the past years, he started losing track of all that he consumed. After all, there was no care for that: he had no family to turn to, no love to come home to, and certainly despised the sight of his own face hard enough to not mind ruining it.
Alexander couldn’t find sanity within himself, so he searched for it between the toxins he let into his body. Isn’t it strange how we are, somehow, insane anyways? High off of more dangerous things; our memories, our guilt, our shame, and our nightmares, so we look for balance in the drugs that were supposed to misbalance us?
A doctor walked his way and asked questions he’s heard way too many times before. “Can you tell me your name and last name?”, “do you have a history of mental illness?”, “Is there anyone we can call for you?”… But it was always that one question that really made him wonder, one he never had an answer for, “why?”. Why did he do it? All of this. He wished he knew. Maybe loneliness? Or dissatisfaction? Constant pain running through his muscles? But no reason seemed to make perfect sense. Something always lacked, something crucial to his healing, something he knew slipped away from him years ago.
Sometimes he remembered his mother’s touch when she came to his bedroom every night for a bedtime story, and he would long for that touch again. He could go back home, but shame would never allow him to. Shame ran through every inch of his bones, it felt like everyone’s eyes constantly begged him to disappear, yet he couldn’t, he tried, he tried so hard to disappear, but something in him never allowed him to fully vanish.
Staring at the dull white ceiling of the hospital, Alexander fought. He fought the waves of memories that hit him every time he starts to sober up. His hand pressed on the 4 on his stomach, it’s been a very long time since he got it done. He was a foolish teenager who thought a number could make it all go away. Instead, the spiral just swirled deeper and deeper until it engulfed him within.
Alexander will never be able to forgive himself. He has always believed that hell was one’s worst memories hunting them forever, submerging every aspect of their lives, yet the guilt, it’s something else. Guilt snaps your bones and leaves you numb and spiteful. You start to destroy yourself from within. Take that dirty look! you deserve it. Swallow that rude comment! you deserve it. Bear that failure! you deserve it. Everything that happens around you starts to become a punishment for your horridness. And God! That makes you vanish faster than anything else. You start by the blame, then the shame, and somewhere down the line you start to forget that you were ever happy at all. You live with the horror, you live with it every day, hell you wouldn’t be able to bear. No one should be forced to bear the laughter of shame in their ears ringing with no stop. No one. Not even Alexander.
