Stockholm Syndrome

Chapter 22: Hope

**Tom's POV**

I was recovering to say the least. Well, I was in recovery. That's probably the better term to use here. Because though I hadn't taken any Vicodin or Oxy since the day I overdosed, I wanted it. Bad. The cravings were fucking awful. Sometimes I woke up sweating at 3 a.m. and crying because my stomach hurt so bad. Some nights I threw up. That had mostly subsided though, the vomiting at least. My back still hurt from time to time. I think I had fucked it up even more from not changing the way I played guitar. But I hadn't done a live show in a couple months, so it had begun to subside. I was inspired to make music again. But not with blink-182. I started a new band. I called up David from Box Car and asked him to play music with me. My friend had hooked up a small drummer boy in glasses named Atom, I enlisted Ryan Sinn (a bassist) and we started a band. We still didn't have a band name or anything, but we had the members and that was a start. Even further, I had written a few songs about the war going on in my head.

My sister, brother and my mom had been in and out of my house for the past couple months. My mom lived a few blocks over from where I did, so I saw her the most. Shon liked to travel, and Kari was doing some marketing bullshit, so they came when they could. My family had taken the liberty of cleaning my house before I came home from the crazy hospital, so that was nice. They all did their best to make sure I wasn't completely alone. And while their comfort was nice, I still felt alone. I felt like there was a piece of me missing. Of course, however, she didn't want to talk to me. I take that back; we did talk occasionally, and I saw her the day I came home, but other than that it was pretty nonexistent.

I suppose I understood that to an extent. Despite the fact that I had almost killed myself, we had a long history and things ended pretty ugly, so I guess space was necessary. At least I saw her one more time and at least we sort of made the effort to make sure the other was okay. Other than knowing that her heart was beating, I had no idea what the fuck she was up to.

And it ate at me in the worst way possible. I wanted to see her again. Hug her, touch her. Something to get me by until we were able to be together once again. I held out so much hope that one day I'd be able to call her mine again. That hope just made everything worse, but it gave me something to live for.

I remembered where her apartment was. This wasn't something I'd do to my exes, show up to their house uninvited. But I just wanted to see her and talk to her about how well I was doing face-to-face. No feelings involved. It's not like we were on a no speaking basis anyways. I called her a few times with no response, as well as sent her a few messages. No reply. If she didn't come to her door that was fine, I wasn't going to sit there and knock all day. Maybe she didn't pay her phone bill or maybe her phone died. I pulled up next to her car, noticing the blink-182 smiley face on the back window. I also saw the logo for Mark's new band right next to it. I sighed to myself, took a deep breath and shut my car off. I adjusted the backwards hat on my head, made sure the buttons on my polo shirt were buttoned, the collar was flat and got out of the car.

I managed to make my way to her door and started tensing up as I reached for it. No noise was coming from inside. Maybe she was asleep. But it was 2pm. She never slept that late unless we had a late night. Ugh. We. Gotta stop using those collective pronouns. My arm reached for the door and I knocked fairly loudly in case she was in another room or something. I stood back a step and tried to look casual as I held my arms down at my sides.

Pretty soon the door knob turned and the door cracked open slowly.

"I..." was the first word out of my mouth before I realized that I was standing in front of Alkaline Trio's shirtless Matt Skiba. What the fuck? He was definitely a wreck, definitely hungover and definitely just woke up.