More Than a Teacher - Ashton Irwin

53

Ashton

My body is tingling, my shirt is strangely damp and there's a horrific stench of musty carpet and stale alcohol.

My surroundings are blurry as I peel open my eyes, a throbbing pain shooting through one side of my head. I blink the grogginess from my eyes and sit up from the creaky old bed.

The walls are stained and moldy and I assume they are supposed to be crisp white, not the yellowing color they are right now.

I glance around, feeling disoriented and detached from my surroundings. My heart is thumping in my ears and I suddenly break out into a sweat.

Where the hell am I?

It's so odd and my brain can't comprehend how I ended up in this foreign room because it definitely isn't the one I woke up in yesterday.

For fucks sake I don't even know where I am.

My head is so heavy and foggy and just looking at plain walls is enough to make me feel like I'm tripping and seeing double. My limbs are airy and don't even feel attached to my body.

Shit, am I about the throw up?

Many people think the sensation is blissful but right now when you're on the come down, it's nothing but nauseating and fills me with paranoia.

I have done it every night. The past god knows how many days I've been on the booze from nine in the morning until the earlier hours of the next day. Each time I drink the worse the guilt gets, resulting in drinking even more the next night so I can compensate for the overload of guilt and drown out the horrible feeling. It's a vicious cycle, one that took me years to break and now here I am again.

I haven't seen my phone in days and I guess I didn't realize that the consequence of throwing it out my car window meant that I don't have a phone anymore.

Fucking dumb ass.

Look at you, a piece of shit just falling straight back into bad habits. The bad habits you've been four months clean of. That's a big fucking deal to be sober for that long after several long years.

My lips haven't touched a single alcoholic drink or any kind of illicit drug since Ava moved in.

I let myself go all because she was dishonest.

It hurt.

It hurt so bad finding out the girl I love had been lying to me, making me believe that she was traveling so well and that I was making progress with such a stubborn thing like herself. I felt proud of her and proud of myself but for her to lie to me wasn't something I expected.

But maybe that's my fault. Maybe it's something I should have been prepared for. Maybe I should have known she wasn't going to be honest with me about every little detail.

At the end of the day, it's not something I should have blamed her for. Just like I've got my own trust issues, so does she. They have combusted together and created one big storm.

I'm so ruined from believing all the lies my parents told.

'Just going to the post office' they'd say only to return many hours later under the influence of heavy drugs and with bruises over their veins where they had shot up. They'd turn into literal psychos until one day, my father injected, my mother didn't and he ended up murdering her - running to the police to blame me straight away.

That's what ruined trust for me and made lies so triggering.

Ava on the other hand is ruined from her parents never allowing her to ever open up. She told me they'd neglect her, she had to teach herself everything because they didn't want anything to do with her. She grew up thinking that keeping your emotions to yourself is normal. Our fucked up childhoods have shaped us this way and that is out of our control.