It's been hours, my corpse-like figure finally settling into a comatose chill, and I genuinely have no idea where Rowan is.
By this point, the ends of my body have gone numb and I'm slumped on the floor, right by the closed door. I can't stop drifting in and out of consciousness - it's as though I'm just on autopilot and it wasn't a choice of mine. It's cold and slightly damp in here and it'll be just my luck if I contract an illness as well as having to come down from this high over the next few days. After having a lot of empty moments to think things through, I've realised that Rowan will do one of two things when she next sees me. She'll never let me leave again, way too concerned to trust me even slightly.
Or she'll break up with me, and we will never have another conversation in the rest of our miserable lives.
My roughed-up head is so heavy and pained that even though I'm laying flat on the floor, I swear I'm going to fall through the floorboards to a certain death. It doesn't feel like such a bad option, especially when the front door closes softly downstairs and I don't only hear a female voice, but the sound of an older man talking too. His voice is so instantly recognisable that I feel my face pale and my eyes clench shut; the fact that I am in so much trouble is finally sinking in.
She did it. She got my dad.
I don't know if my fear has increased considerably or I'm slowly starting to sober up, but the sound of heavy cargo boots ricochets throughout the house and it feels like I'm in one of those suspenseful horror movies that Rowan and I used to watch all the time before everything got so bad. By this point, my brain is so distressed that I gag so violently and I almost throw up over furniture that doesn't belong to me. I have no idea how I'm going to rectify the damage I've caused over the course of just three hours, but it'll be near impossible with the unreliability of my emotions.
The footsteps begin to thud their way up the stairs. Every step closer to this door creates a new infinite wave of panic that transmits itself through the most debilitating headache of my life. I hear muffled voices and the common theme is that they are hushed and they only sound angry or worried. I'm really regretting showing up here tonight because I don't have the strength to keep the door shut for long.
As my girlfriend and my father, if I'm lucky enough to still be able to call them that, reach the landing and are now advancing on me at an alarming pace, I crawl over to the door and sit myself against it in a lopsided position, as my head won't stay up on its own.
"Sophie?" Rowan asks softly, her calm tone leaving me disorientated, "are you awake in there?"
I try not to start crying, but I'm not even sure why I would be so upset considering I don't even feel sad in any way. My body feels hollow: void of emotions, void of memory, void of drugs.
"Soph, it's dad," comes the one voice that I really do not need or want to hear in my current state, "I know you're right on the other side of this wall, so listen to me right now and let us in."
I'm whizzed back in time to the first fallout him and I had over substance abuse, right in the dead of winter last year when I'd just turned seventeen and I was more naïve and less careless. We'd already been at a lower point in our relationship, but he swore he would cut ties with me if I ever did that much again.
And here I am, waiting for his parental rant and then the blow of his final goodbye to me.
"Open the door, Sophie." He's getting more and more impatient and subsequently sounding more and more fatherly. I feel sick.
My dad has always been different to what my mum was once like, in the sense that he isn't afraid to confront me at any point, even if it means kicking me when I'm down. We used to harmonise in that regard, two people who always tell it as it is even if the fallout is worse than the advantages. I don't know when that ended but it's like the two of us are polar opposites now, no longer compatible in any way I can think of.
