It wouldn’t take much for him to break down.

One more time he was let down, one more time he was the one letting down someone else, one more drink to send him teetering off the steep precipice of the self-deception he was so wrapped up in, one more lie, one more failure.

He was only one man, and one man could only take so much.

The drinking only helped when he was drinking. The bitter alcohol burned his throat on the way down like an acid, like a poison designed to wreak havoc within, and in a way, he supposed that was what it did. It dulled the pain and sent him to a mindless nirvana where he could let go of everything that was wrong far from the hellhole he inhabited.

Everything that was wrong with him, with her… with his entire life.

And everything that was wrong was everything.

Nothing was right.

Nothing was ever going to be right because nothing ever is.

The vodka, the rum, the gin… it helped. It dulled the pain because it created a new one, a fire burning in his belly to remind him of what he had to remember when he would later find himself praying to the porcelain goddess the following morning. It took the agony away for the time being to leave him on cloud nine, but the worst part was coming down.

Coming down.

Waking up cold and grounded in an unfamiliar bed next to an unfamiliar woman to later find that he was missing a few hundred dollars, kneeling over the toilet and miserably emptying his stomach until he had nothing left to give, dealing with the humiliating aftermath of the drunken messages he had left on the phones of the few friends and acquaintances he had left… seeing her face when he came home stinking of sex, vodka, and other women.

That was the worst part.

Her face. Her beautiful, disappointed face.

When he sobered up, everything was wrong again.

Nothing was right.

It never is.

But, most importantly, when he sobered up, the pain returned. Just when he had deceived himself into believing that it had finally receded, that the parasite he was forced to live with had finally been banished… it came back.

She came back.

He couldn’t let her down again.

He was falling into a weeping, drunken wreck, falling to pieces.

He couldn’t take her down with him.

He was choking on his every weakness, drowning in his every flaw and imperfection.

There were times when he thought about stopping. When he thought about pouring all of the alcohol down the cracked, rusted sink and watching the sole reliever of his pain trickle away down the drain. He thought about it every time he saw her wounded eyes follow him when he came through the door drunk and angry in the middle of the night. He thought about it even more when he saw her bruises, the bruises he had put there.

But he couldn’t do it. He needed her, but he needed the alcohol more. He needed it so that he could live with himself, live with all he had done.

There was so much he wanted to do for her. So much he wanted to give.

But this was all he could do, all he could give.

Sadness, remorse, envy…

Bruises.

It was all he could give her, and God, how he wished he could make her happy just once.

But nothing ever went right for him.

And it wasn’t about to change.

Nothing ever does.

He drank to keep the tempest within him at bay, to calm the raging storm that threatened to unleash itself drink after drink, to cage the beast that would surely destroy the both of them were it released. But the drinking didn’t help much.

It didn’t help enough.

Not this time.

It never does.

Sometimes he thought his head was going to explode.

Sometimes he wished it would.

Another day, another drink later, he waited until she was asleep to reach into the medicine cabinet for the loaded revolver he kept behind the Ibuprofen he grasped at every morning to alleviate the residual hangover. He closed the mirror and turned the gun over and over in his hands, staring at the tile and visualizing his cold, dead body slumped against it in a puddle of scarlet blood.

If only it were that easy.

And in a way, it was that easy. He had been mapping this out in his head for weeks, knowing that he needed to do it for her. She couldn’t go on like this anymore, and neither could he. He couldn’t see the hurt in her eyes, the bruises on her body that he couldn’t remember putting there but knew that he had.

He couldn’t live with what he’d done to her.

He suspected that she couldn’t, either.

He didn’t hesitate when he lifted the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Because even when the bruises faded, the hurt never would.