Written In The Stars: Book Two

CHAPTER SIX: FACING THE GHOSTS

Elijah emptied the contents of his stomach into the toilet, sweat dripping off his forehead onto the white seat while his temples pounded like a snare drum. Six days in, and Elijah was questioning if he could even survive detox, nor less the rest of it.

His father had visited him every day and every night through what Elijah assumed were hallucinations.

"You're a fucking failure, Elijah. That's why I couldn't love you."

"All that anger in you, kid, you'll never be rid of it. You may kick the booze, but you can't kick what's rooted inside you."

"I thought I could beat the evil out of you. No such luck."

"You're a worthless piece of shit. I hit the jackpot when you ran away. You think you were freeing yourself, but you'll never be free. I'm the one you freed, little boy, because I didn't have to look at you anymore. I didn't have to listen to your fucking whining. I didn't have to listen to your stupid fucking voice."

That man was the first to visit, looking exactly as he did last time he saw him, the day before he turned eighteen. When he saw his mom, she no longer looked consumed by the illness that took her life, but looked much like she did when they moved in next door to the Martin's.

Beautiful, nearly black hair flowing in short waves. Blue eyes that could pierce right through someone's soul. Pale skin that matched the ghost she was now. Her feet were bare like they normally would be when she was home, with a small silver chain around her ankle, a heart dangling from it.

She wasn't cruel like his father was, but she wasn't exactly sugar coating anything either.

"It's killing me to watch you go through this, Elijah. You were always meant to be better than this. Better than him."

"This is what love does to us. It has the power to lift us up into all the world's beauty, or has the power to destroy us. It all depends who we choose to love, and how we choose to love them back. Maddie's love could have saved you, sweetheart. All she wanted was to show you that beauty.

"But you're too scared to love with the light. You allowed too much darkness to fill you, and it leaked into her. That darkness of yours destroyed something that could have been your salvation."

"You would have healed yourself, Elijah. If only you hadn't let that comment invade your thoughts. If only you hadn't run away. I saw your future, and you would have found your joy and light if you hadn't run away from it."

"Mary would have shown you all the love that I had for you. Mitch would have done all the father/son things you craved from your own father. And that little girl? The little girl you always felt that need to protect and cherish? She would have shown you your worth. A partner may not be able to heal you, but your family could have helped you to heal yourself. When you pushed that little girl away, you pushed them all away."

Elijah laid his head on the cold bathroom tile, listening as his roommate opened yet another candy in the next room. He was an older man, just a few years younger than Mitch. Friendly enough, and unusually protective of Elijah. Apparently Elijah reminded him of his own son, who he hadn't spoken to in nearly ten years.

Rehab had a wide variety of people, both teens and grandparents. Addiction didn't discriminate based on race, gender, religion, age, or political beliefs. It hit all sorts like a virus, eating away at everything that made a person who they were.

There used to be some measure of joy in his life. Not just with her, but with Mitch and Mary as well. When they'd decorated his apartment while he was out, before he destroyed most of the contents. They'd wanted to create a home, so he'd feel less inclined to disappear. That Elijah had disappeared despite their efforts, leaving only the worst version of himself.

True to his promise, Mitch took the two-hour drive to his apartment at least once a week, sometimes coming after work and not leaving until nearly midnight. Elijah remembered being picked off the grown, thrown into the shower fully clothed. He remembered seeing Mitch's tears as he cleaned the apartment in silence for the dozenth time and all the times after. Sometimes he'd lay Elijah's limp body on the bed to get a proper rest that never came.

No amount of booze could rid him of the nightmares, and time had done its trick, causing the scent of the pillow next to him to fade.

"Do you need anything in there?" his roommate, Jonathan, called out.

Though Elijah hadn't turned on the light, his eyes still squinted shut from the light in the bedroom the two of them shared. He hadn't even had time to shut the door. "The giraffe on my bed."

That beat up old giraffe had smelled like Madeline still. It was in her possession for a good sixteen years, and Elijah wondered if she'd slept with it every night since they'd been apart for the last two.

There were crispy spots along the giraffe 'fur', likely from where she'd held it closed to her face and cried, dropping snot and other elements of her sadness, soaking it in as its own grief. It'd been her lifeline out of the despair, and now here Elijah was, using it as his own lifeline.

The two had been together so briefly, Elijah often wondered if his nightmare had actually been those two weeks, morphing his reality. But Mitch's presence proved that theory wrong time and time again. She was not the dream plaguing him. Madeline had been real. She'd been his. His reality.

The giraffe dropped against the floor before Jonathan lowered himself to the ground, setting the stuffed animal beneath Elijah's head. "I bet there's one hell of a story that goes with that stuffed animal."

Elijah shrugged. Compared to all the other stories, this one was fairly mild. "Not really. One it for a kid I used to babysit when I was a teenager. She gave it to her dad to give to me when he dropped me off here. Called it my courage."

"Seems to work," Jonathan muttered before he rest his back against the wall. "This is my seventh stint in rehab in the past fifteen years. Haven't figured out how to get it to stick yet. But you learn to read people in places like this. Me, I'm a hopeless case. I've lost everything that's worth fighting for.

"You? You've got what it takes to make this stick. You're young enough where you can still make something good out of your life, and you've got the strength to make it happen, a strength I've never had. If anyone can kick this, it's you."

Elijah shook his head. He didn't feel courageous, and he didn't feel strong. The tremors, the fever, the hallucination. He felt like he was being consumed from the inside out. Right now, he just felt hopeless. Not just. He also felt anxious and angry, not to mention the pure emotional pain.

He hadn't been sober for this long since he first picked up the bottle. Alcohol couldn't take away his anger, but over time, it allowed him a blissful sort of numb from the anguish. Now the emotions he'd been drowning for two years were all coming back to haunt him in full force. Mitch called him a survivor, but Elijah wasn't certain if he could survive this.