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Holidays, Andrew is learning, work differently in treatment programs.
The facility is loath to alter their precious routines, so for the most part it is the same as any other day, with extra decoration and cheer from staff with lives to live outside of the sad, cool-gray walls Easthaven boasts. Calming. Supposed to be, anyway.
That’s what they focus on here. Peace and quiet. Healing. Routines upon which they can build a healthy lifestyle, once they’re deemed fit for polite society. Of course, Andrew will never belong to that category, but they’re trying. Coaxing. Pretending to guide him through withdrawals instead of replaying the worst nights of his life over and over.
Andrew sleeps in his own room. On paper, this is due to his history, the buzzing pain and the collateral damage both, but he and the doctor both know that’s just an excuse. There are plenty of pretty little victims here, failing to sleep in a room shared with a stranger and being pumped with sedatives nightly to repair their insomnia. It doesn’t work that way, but the sedation keeps them calm.
Andrew is not calm. He is nothing. To the casual observer this means the same thing, and so no one has bothered to ply him with medication. He’s here to come off them, but that’s never stopped these places before. Or maybe they have tried. Bee has visited a few times. Maybe she put them off it.
Thinking is useless in a place like this. Thinking leads him down dead-end roads to blue eyes and scars beyond what he’d imagined a stray would pick up. Hot skin beneath an age-worn t-shirt and the hard, prickled edge of a scar well past fading. His pulse thrums heavy in his wrist. An inch higher and he’d touch one of his own owchies.
Stupid. The meds clouded his perception of Neil. The meddling, idealistic idiot doesn’t matter. What matters is surviving. One night and then one day and then another and another and another. 48 days so far. 49 in a matter of minutes.
It’s a holiday. To celebrate, they were allowed to stay up with the television trained on some inane New Year’s Eve program. Pop stars sing. Popular TV hosts chatter senselessly into microphones. Andrew stares at the wall and tracks his pulse and imagines it is the weight of a cigarette in his hand instead.
When he stares at the wall long enough, his peripheral goes gray, and he senses the lack of a body beside him, soaking in his secondhand smoke while wasting another. It is so easy to be still, now. To accept that some addled part of him misses a pipedream, a machination of his mania.
Neil is nothing. He flicks his eyes to where Neil would be, and the grayness solidifies once again into the wall.
One of the girls on the unit laughs raucously at another’s joke. They’re tired, mostly, and the atmosphere is tense and yawning. Med-call was fifteen minutes ago, timed exactly so they’d be wrapped up snug as bugs shortly after they see the rise of a new year.
Today is the same as tomorrow, the delineation between them false. One day and then another and another and another. Today, 48; tomorrow, 49. Today, trapped; tomorrow, free. He imagines Neil has some stupid, wistful idea of what a new year will hold. For all that Neil understands the cruel way of things, he is equally prone to foolishness. He needs a tether. Something to pull his head out of the clouds. Problem. He’s just another problem that needs solving.
The music swells. Tinny cheers ring from the TV as the camera pans up huge, brightly lit scaffolding. It is almost the same every year, only a slightly different angle, different music and lighting, to separate this year’s grand destruction from year’s past. The host describes the luxuriously decorated ball, but Andrew tunes it out. Focuses instead on his heart in his ears, the vague splotch of black in the center of his vision from the bright overhead lights. He doesn’t need this cluttering up his memory, too.
The countdown starts.
A girl joins in with the TV on ten.
On nine, a few others join her.
By five, almost everyone in the lounge is counting.
Andrew tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling. There is a scuff on one of the tiles.
On one, he closes his eyes.
Another year, rung in by the delirious cheers of the psychologically unwell.
Happy New Year!
They’ve long since learned he doesn’t play along, and it doesn’t much matter, anyway: a couple idiots need to be separated at the mouth. He is left to his own devices in the far corner of the room.
He would kill for a smoke. He’s graduated beyond lying to himself that it’s just about the smoking and not about the person. Neil is hot, and Andrew is gay, and that is the long and the short of it. Everything else is imaginary, faked by an addled mind. There is a reason he never allowed himself to make the big decisions while he was high.
He lurks by the six-inch locked door, impatient to go to his room. The privacy was a double-edged sword, but so is everything where people are involved. He will be gone before the doctor comes back, his discharge paperwork already organized and insurance chomping at the bit to have him out before the new year strikes twelve.
It’s a new year. He runs the number through his head, his calendar turning, but what is a year? They could mark it at any point and it would make no difference. Dates are irrelevant, unimportant, and as such he is cursed with a categorical memory of them.
Finally, they’re escorted back to their rooms. The fluorescent lighting remains the same, unflinching in the face of this supposedly monumental thing. A new year. New year-new me, as the chirpy, freckled RN sang all day. New year but it’s all the same. One day then the next and the next and the next. One foot after the other.
An unlocked door. One dressed bed. A curtain for a bathroom door. Tomorrow it’s done. New year-old him. Exhaustion weighs heavily on him, familiar as the early stages of withdrawal. His eyes are dry, eyelids heavy. He doesn’t bother changing from one pair of sweatpants to the other, and instead just lays on top of the covers.
He sleeps badly, hyper-aware of the night-shift glancing inside every fifteen minutes. They don’t talk to him. They know he won’t answer; they stopped trying weeks ago.
Mostly, he stares at the ceiling as the dull blast of fireworks drifts to silence. One of the guys snores, loud and rhythmic. His roommate wears earplugs but the bags beneath his eyes never improve.
It’s all the same as the night before and the night before and the night before. Tomorrow will be different; it will also be the same. He hasn’t been sober for two years. He doesn’t believe in regret, or trepidation, only planning.
He has only met Neil in snatches. Tomorrow-today he will meet him and prove once and for all that he is just another meddling addict that Andrew has to keep track of. Everything else was a byproduct of the medication making him see something shiny in unpressed coal.
It’s a new year. He will meet it head-on and evaluate his choices. One step then another. That’s all it ever is.