Feeling Like Your Drowning in Your Own Mind

The hard times...

I can't really say when his drinking started, or when it got to the point it should be concerning. All I know is what I remember. The last year of him living at home, the last year my family was partially whole.
My freshman year of high school wasn't special: school, extra curricular, home, repeat.
My life wasn't bad in the slightest. I just started realizing that my father was starting to become someone else. Wanting to pick fights with my mother, hiding away in the bedroom, not really talking to his family. It hurt, a lot.
Me, my sister and my mother went on a vacation and came home and I saw several empty bottles and a half full bottle of alcohol sitting in the living room floor. And not even 2 minutes later when we all walked into the house... they were gone. It terrified me to think he thought the only way of coping was with alcohol. But I guess that's the funny thing about an addiction, you don't have a choice.
I know when I was younger my father unfriended someone due to them saying that his alcoholism would end up costing him his family. And how I wish he would have listened. But that's another thing. Sometimes rational logic seems to be irrational when you don't think you have a problem.
When there are signs of people being concerned, that's when we should start looking into a mirror and self reflet. But addiction doesn't always give us that choice. It takes our free will and turns it into an internal fight with ourselves. And I wish my father could've won his. But if he had, I probably wouldn't have written this story. My life would be so much different. And I don't know if it would've been for the better or worse. Maybe in an alternate timeline things were better. But there's no way to know. Just the hope that maybe my dad is still out there loving a different version of me. And that's what I hold on to every day.
And the fact that I know he loved me until the very end. Like I did him.