Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Roderick
I wake up at nine forty-three.
That’s already a failure.
I know how fucking ridiculous that sounds.
Most people in my line of work would kill for a morning like this—sunlight spilling across the sheets like a lover I forgot to kiss goodnight, no alarm screaming bloody murder, no tour manager pounding on the hotel door because I missed another radio interview or photo op or mic check.
But for me? Nine forty-three means I’m already behind, already drowning in a day I’m supposed to control but never quite manage to.
In rehab, they drilled it into us—routines, structure, predictability.
Up at six. Lights out by ten. Three meals, two snacks.
We should follow the same schedule. Wake up, make your bed, write your feelings in a stupid spiral notebook like that’s going to keep the cravings away.
Pretend that the act of putting your pain on paper can keep you from ripping yourself apart. Confession time: it didn’t.
And now, three weeks out? I’m supposed to want that.
Supposed to find comfort in oatmeal and silence.
Supposed to feel grateful I made it back without dying on a bathroom floor in Tokyo.
I’m supposed to feel lucky. Humbled. I’m supposed to believe I’ve earned this blank page, this second chance, this fucking “new beginning” that sounds poetic until you’re staring at your ceiling wondering who the hell you’re supposed to be without the noise and the numbness.
I’m not going to lie, I don’t feel lucky.
I feel like I’ve been stripped down to the raw muscle of who I was before I ever picked up a guitar, before I ever tasted oblivion, before I knew what it meant to take the edge off with a shot and a lie. I don’t know how to be human in the morning.
Not like this.
Not without something in my veins to take the pressure off waking up. Not without tequila humming in my blood and telling me it’s okay to skip breakfast if I can just get to noon without screaming.
The numbers on the clock continue to blink at me in smug, digital red—nine forty-three. No wait, it’s now nine forty-four. With it, a fresh wave of shame curls hot in my gut.
It’s too late to fake being the early-rising version of myself that group therapy wants to believe in. Too early to say fuck it and swan-dive into a bottle I swore off. So I lie in that ugly space between good intentions and bad decisions, trying to breathe through a morning I never wanted.
I tell myself it’s fine. That healing doesn’t follow a schedule. That no one out there gives a shit if I miss breakfast or sleep in past eight.
The problem is that I give a shit. Somehow, I care in this quiet, restless, furious way that makes me want to crawl out of my skin.
Because waking up late makes me feel like I’ve already lost the day.
Like everyone else is already halfway through living while I’m just opening my eyes.
Like life moved on while I was too numb, too gone, too far out to catch the bus.
Like I missed the orientation for adulthood, and now I’m standing in the hallway barefoot, pantsless, and late for finals—with no idea what the fuck the test is even about.
And worse—so much fucking worse—is the voice in the back of my head asking if I was better broken. Better drunk. Better high and feral and loud, with blood on my knuckles and music vibrating through my bones so hard it drowned everything else out.
At least then I felt something, I had rhythm. I could play three sets a night and wake up next to a stranger whose name I didn’t want to know, and none of it mattered because the high was the purpose. The show was the drug. The pain was something I could shred through.
Now I wake up stone sober, and I don’t even know what the fuck I’m supposed to do with myself. With my mind. With my hands. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be when I’m not chasing the next hit, the next lay, the next high to pretend I’m not hollow.
And yeah, this isn’t about blaming Kit or that StringTheory girl—not really—but the truth is, if I hadn’t let myself get cracked open by a fucking email thread and a few well-placed memories, I might not feel this fucking wrecked.
If I hadn’t let myself remember her—remember what it felt like to taste Kit on my tongue, to dream about her hands on me, to wake up needing her like air—I wouldn’t be here, spiraling like this.
I didn’t even want to fall asleep last night because I was scared I’d see her again. That I’d wake up haunted by the sound of her voice, the press of her mouth against mine, or the shape she made when she curled into me and whispered that I was the only thing keeping her sane.
But sleep won. I wasn’t strong enough to fight it.
And now I’m here, with the taste of her still in the back of my throat and the craving buzzing under my skin.
I have to get on with the program. Even when there’s nothing on the calendar today.
Just a two-word promise scrawled in ink, I keep retracing every morning like it might eventually mean more: stay sober.
That’s it. That’s all.
Stay sober.
My mouth tastes like cotton and old mistakes, even though it’s been forty-nine days since I touched a drink or had any pills. Forty-nine days without poison, and still there’s a burn in the back of my throat like my body’s waiting for me to betray it again. Like it knows I’m close.
Like it’s daring me.
The apartment hums with loneliness. Just the rain hissing soft against the windows. Seattle cries in the morning. Like the whole city is hungover and trying to hide it.
I listen too long. Footsteps above me—my neighbors are pacing again, their anxious rhythm pounding through the ceiling. A bus wheezes on the street below. Someone yells. Someone else slams a door.
This? This is what I gave up the stage for?
Empty days, countless seconds without having anything to do, and the silence of my guitar that doesn’t want to be played. I shut my eyes like maybe if I don’t see the world, it won’t see me back.
Like I’m not being stalked by my fucking mind. Hunted and haunted. Both.
There’s something inside me clawing, begging for release. It wants a drink. A line. A fucking bullet—anything that numbs. Something to rip away the pressure behind my eyes and the bile clawing its way up my throat. Something to drown the shame.
I tell myself to breathe, to move. To start the day like I’m not unraveling at the seams.
I leave the bed because lying there makes it worse. I stretch, kind of. Go through the motions of something they made us do in group—breathe, reach, hold. It’s not yoga. It’s not anything I used to do. Not even close. But it’s something. And right now, that has to be enough.
I shuffle to the kitchen in boxers and a T-shirt. The floor’s too clean. There’s no ashtray full of butts or sticky bottle caps. No crushed pizza box with Sharpie lyrics scrawled across it in a blackout haze.
No proof of the old me.
Just me. And this quiet. And the itch under my skin that tells me I’m not okay.
I open the fridge and stare at nothing. A half-empty bottle of flat club soda. A lemon that’s gone to shit. Leftover Chinese in a Styrofoam box that I don’t trust. No beer. No whiskey. Nothing.
I close the fridge and grab a protein bar off the counter—some godawful peanut butter protein bar one of the counselors shoved into my duffel on my last day at rehab.
It tastes like poorly flavored cardboard, but I eat it anyway.
Because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Fuel the body. Stay upright. Stay clean.
I boil water in the kettle that whistles too fucking loud, then pour it over instant coffee because I haven’t figured out how to make real coffee yet without fucking it up or burning my hand. The French percolator is a joke, or I’m too fucking useless to understand it.
I sit on a stool, setting my mug on the marble counter. While sipping the coffee, I stare at nothing and try to ignore the blinking light on the answering machine across the room.
It blinks red. Someone called, left a message hoping I’ll respond. I don’t check. I just watch it blink like a warning light I’ve learned to ignore.
There’s a pile of unopened mail on the counter. Half of it’s addressed to Jordan Smith; I’m guessing he lived here before me. I should do something with it. Maybe I’ll let my agent figure that out—if I still have an agent.
Who cares? I should look into that soon, but definitely not today. I take another bite of the protein bar. It flakes in my hand like dry mud. I try hard not to remember last night. Try not to think about the guitar in the living room gathering dust. Try not to want anything I can’t have.
By ten-thirty, I’m already pacing. I flick on the radio, but everything sounds clean.
Too clean. Pop hits from Matchbox Twenty and Hanson.
Fucking “MMMBop.” I can’t listen to that bubblegum shit right now.
I turn the dial until I land on a station playing something dirty. Nirvana. Live. The unplugged one.
Kurt’s voice drags across the room and tears through everything that’s tried to patch me up. That raw rasp. That final stretch of sorrow before the silence took him. It makes my chest twist. Something shifts under my ribs, deep and jagged, like a song I forgot how to finish.
I miss it.
The studio. The dive bars—the stadiums. The ache in my fingertips from too many sets, too many encores. I even miss the shitty hotel mattresses and the manager yelling that I missed another photo shoot.
You don’t realize how loud your life was until it goes quiet.
Now I have whole days that don’t belong to anyone. I’m supposed to fill them with journaling, AA meetings, and the gym. Instead, I’m thinking about how many ways I’ve fucked up and if I can make it up to anyone.
I can’t remember the last time I wrote a song that didn’t come from somewhere soaked in tequila or fury.
I grab my guitar. It’s leaning against the wall like it’s waiting to be picked last. I hold it, fingers stiff. I strum a chord. It sounds like nothing.
No crowd to lie to. No amp to scream into. No tour bus rumbling down the coast.
Just me.
Sober. Bored. Angry.
The phone rings. I stare at it like it’s a poltergeist I should run from. I don’t answer. I know it’s someone who means well. Cleo, maybe? One of my brothers or my mother, who’s been trying to connect. She wants to help me. It’d be good for her image. Obviously, she has her priorities straight.
If I answer, they might ask the same thing:
“How are you holding up?”
Like sobriety is a mountain I’m climbing in a denim jacket and no rope. As if I’m brave for not poisoning myself today.
The truth?
I don’t know how to hold anything.
I’m almost thirty-one years old, forty-nine days sober, and I feel like I’m learning to be a human from scratch. By noon, I head to the gym for an hour, shower, and pretend it’s an accomplishment.
By two, I walk to the record store just to breathe the dust and vinyl.
There are books in here too. It’s too feminine, trendy, and .
. . it’s just not for me. There’s a cello gathering dust in the corner.
I want to ask if it has a bow, if I could touch it and see if I can find some music behind it. I don’t.
I end up buying the EP for “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” It feels like something I should listen to. I don’t know why, it just does.
By four, I’m counting the hours until it’s socially acceptable to go to sleep and end the day without breaking something.
And through it all, there’s this small, gnawing thing at the base of my skull whispering that maybe I was better when I was drunk. More interesting. More alive.
I hate that thought.
But I don’t know how to disprove it yet.
While I wait for that time, I open my laptop and make sure the cable to the internet is connected.
I wait for it to dial up and almost smile when I see a message from StringTheory27.
My day just got a little better. Sometimes I feel like there’s one person in this world who understands a part of me, even when she can be infuriating.
We’ve been exchanging messages for the past three weeks, and she’s given me more hope than anyone else has in the past ten years.