Page 214 of Tell Me I'm Enough

I grab my phone and scroll to her name, stare at it, then scroll past it and hit call on the only other person who can talk me down right now.

He answers on the third ring. “What’s up, man?”

“Hey, Bash,” I say, voice rough.

There’s a pause on the other end, like he’s clocking my tone. “You alright?”

I snort quietly. “Yeah. Totally thriving. Living my best Hallmark Christmas movie over here.”

Bash exhales a soft laugh. “That bad, huh?”

“Worse,” I admit. “But I figured I’d check in. See how things are back home for you. Maybe give myself a little distraction.”

“Things are…fine,” he says, and I know that word well. Fine for him means complicated. “My mom keeps trying to feed me like it’ll make all our problems go away. But we’re doing good. It’s the first time in years that we’ve started to talk about everything more. It feels like progress.”

“Well, I’m glad one of us is thriving,” I tell him sarcastically.

“It’s still hard. The good kind, though. Being here makes a lot of stuff loud for me, but I think that’s kind of the point.”

I lean back against the headboard, staring at the ceiling. “You always sound so put together when you say shit like that.”

He laughs again, quieter this time. “That’s ‘cause you can’t see me pacing my childhood bedroom like a psycho. And you haven’t watched me walk into my dead sister’s room just to cry all night.”

“Fair.”

He’s silent for a second, and I know he’s trying to assess why I made this call, trying to figure out what’s actually going on.

“So,” Bash says, casually but slightly prying. “What’s going on?”

I shrug even when I know he can’t see it. “Nothing. Like I said, just called to check in on a friend.”

“Mm, well, seeing as it’s—” he pauses. “One in the morning, and you never call over texting unless you’re drunk…I’d say something’s on your mind. Unless…are you drunk? You don’t really sound like it.”

I let out a heavy sigh. “No, um…I haven’t drank since I got here for break.”

“Okay,” he says, assessingly. “Iwouldsay that’s great. But something tells me it’s not. At least not in this moment.”

I close my eyes. “How’d you do it?”

“What part?”

“Getting sober,” I say. “By yourself. No program. No rehab. Just…deciding to go cold turkey.”

He stops before he answers me, and when he does, I can tell he’s trying to be conscious with his reply.

“I don’t know if I’d call it deciding,” he says. “It was more like…running out of options.”

I swallow hard at that.

“I kept telling myself I was fine,” he continues. “That I had control. That I could stop whenever I wanted. And then one day I realized I didn’t actually know how to exist without it as a crutch.”

My jaw tightens, knowing just how much I’ve been using it as my crutch for years now.

“And that scared me,” he adds, getting honest. “Not the drinking, but the fact that I couldn’t sit alone with my own head.”

I rub my thumb over my jaw, forcing the tension out. “Did you have…withdrawals?”

“What are you currently feeling?” he asks without missing a beat.