At the age of 6 I was convinced the smell of an old bar and day old booze was a perfume my mother drowned herself in before dropping me off at school at 9am on a Monday morning.
 
At age 11 the smell was a reminder that my mom was yet again glued to a bar stool on a Tuesday night.
 
At age 14 I realized that the alcohol was a life line for a life that I wasn’t sure meant anything to me anymore. The ghost of who my mother once was, or who I imagined her to be haunted me whether I was awake or asleep. The craving for a mother’s embrace stabbed me in the heart and left scars all over my body which I later tried to hide with ones I made myself. 
 
At age 16 instead of playing softball and having sleep overs on the weekends with my friends while we talked about the boys who we let touch our innocent bodies before giggling like the oblivious school girls we were, I was picking my mother’s belligerent body that was dowsed in an unhealthy amount of Key Stone Light up off the ground. I set her on the bed to quiet my six-year-old brother’s screaming pleas to “help mom.” He wanted me to help mom and not let mom fall, but I wasn’t too certain she hadn’t already fallen. Fallen into a pit of despair and a long journey of mistakes and hardships. She slipped away from reality like a silk gown off the hips of a woman.
 
When I was 17, I took a bottle of pills. I tried to stop my heart from beating, the voices in my head from speaking, my emotions from wrapping themselves around my body and holding me a hostage in the evil dungeon of regrets and mistakes I knew my mother made too. 
 
I often pick myself up off the ground, throwing myself into my bed to sleep away the depression that dominates me and helps me forget that I allow it.