Method Acting || Joe Keery

T W E N T Y N I N E

~ PLEASE READ~
Before reading on, I want to give a quick trigger warning for grief and depressive feelings and thoughts. I personally lost someone to addiction, so writing this was cathartic, but pretty heavy too. This chapter is basically Charlee working through her grief, and learning to lean on Joe. You won't miss a whole lot of you decide to skip it. Stay safe my loves.

I stand in front of my bookshelf, chewing on my nails.

I know I have some photo albums that I had brought with me when I moved. It's just a case of stepping forward, and actually looking for them.

But, I'm frozen. Just like I was frozen the day of Drew's funeral.

Ever since Maya mentioned Drew the other day, I haven't been able to get him off my mind.

It's funny. I'd managed to go quite awhile after the funeral without even thinking of him. Now, with just one mention, he's all I can think about. He's infiltrated my mind.

I'd felt guilty when I realised I'd not been thinking about him. Now, he's filled my mind with such a vengeance, that I'm almost convinced he's punishing me for it.

Robert says that the seven steps of grief are kind of accurate, but that not everyone goes through all of them, and not necessarily in the same order.

That kind of disappointed me. I'd clearly been in denial, but now I don't know what to expect to happen next.

I don't feel angry, I don't feel like bargaining. I don't feel anything but a heavy sadness. A hopelessness.

It's suddenly so raw, and real to me that I'll never see him again. I'll never get to hear his jokes. I'll never get to brace myself for the late night phone calls, because his life didn't follow the same circadian rhythm as mine. I'll never get to hold him while he is the one that is lost, and I am the one helping him. I'll never get to worry about him anymore.

That last one really hits me. Because it's a sadness, but mixed with relief. The stress is over, but at what cost? Is it better to have him and be worried for him, than to not have him at all? The guilt sits in this question somewhere here too.

Maybe Maya was right. Maybe I am clinging to the people in my life a bit tighter now, maybe I do have a subconscious fear of losing them, because I lost Drew. Because I finally let people in, like really let them in.

I take a step forward and swallow. I'm no longer frozen, just nervous and cautious like a gazelle slowly walking out into the open. I remind myself that there's no lions here. Only pictures that I can put away if it gets too much.

I take another step forward, and run my fingers across the spines of my books. Looking for the albums.

Finally my fingers reach two large, black albums. I tentatively pull them out, and sit with them on the floor.

As I open the first one, I'm immediately hit with pictures of Drew and I when we were little.

There's one of him trying to help mum bathe me, and I let out a giggle.

There was a time when he looked after me, before I became his carer and looked after him.

The picture is ironic to me, as a memory of me bathing Drew when he was sick and detoxing comes to my mind.

When I was helping him, I wasn't angry at him. I was sad. Not just for me, having a brother going through this, but sad that he was going through this again.

Each rehab admission was a scene of cautious hope. Some people may say it's impossible to feel both hope and dread at the same time, but it's not.

Hope mixed in with dread, are the two staple emotions when loving someone with addiction. Of course it is though, addiction is full of contradicting feelings and behaviours.