Ne ten alkohol, před kterým utíkal.

Někdy víš, že máš plavat. A stejně se necháš unášet.

Not the booze he was running from.

It was fear. The old kind, carried up from childhood, set in so early he stopped feeling it as fear and started taking it for himself. They taught him to lower his head before he could walk. Taught him that standing up meant getting hit. So he didn't stand. Not as a kid, not later, when he finally could.

When they humiliated him, he stayed quiet. When they did it to others, quiet too. Not because it didn't touch him. It did. But standing up, for himself or anyone else, meant breaking something they'd set in concrete long ago, and he didn't have it in him. Swallowing was easier. Swallowing was always easier.

And the drink came in right there. Not as a vice. As a dressing on the place where a spine should have been. Swallow it, wash it down, and the fear went quiet for a while. It didn't leave. It just went quiet. And he got so used to that quiet he kept paying for it, glass after glass, because without it he'd have had to feel what stayed in him, unfinished, from childhood.

He wasn't running from the world. He was running from the boy they taught never to stand up. And that boy waited the whole time. Waited for someone to finally take his side.

© DarkMirax