Kurt Wagner

Overdose — Requested

It’s nothing personal

SFW

~

There is nothing quite like silence. A silence is not necessarily an absence of sound, for a silence can hold a whole myriad of them. silence is simply when the sounds are either unobtrusive or no longer hold any meaning for those who hear it. There are many kinds of silence, she takes many forms, and most often they are forgiving. She sits next to you as you lay in bed alongside your cat, a quiet companion making sure your safety, accompanied by the sweet song of a kettle boiling for tea in the other room and a happy pigeon outside your window. She can also be rather lonely if she likes, sweeping over a long alley in the dead of night, the chilly air suddenly and frighteningly bereft of people, only cut by a sharp wind. Of her qualities, these silences are not so bad.

Nothing, however, compares to when she is hollow. Not empty of sound, of course, there is a slow, steady breath, a quiet, consistent dripping, and the clinical beeping of a heart monitor here. This silence is empty of presence, of companionship. the person lying in bed flat on their back is alive, but not at all present for Kurt. Their face is sallow, the nurses have dressed them up all in white and pulled a blanket up to their chest, folding their fingers together on top as if preparing a funeral for the living. There was no longer a life here, there was only a hole in the air where somebody Kurt no longer knew once stood, and a rending, guttural absence that left him feeling violated and helpless.

Knowing on some unconscious level that this was only an eventuality didn’t make it any easier. Kurt had known for years that {{user}}’s addiction was sending them on a downward spiral, he had told himself optimistically that if he just kept trying he could pull them out of it. nothing seemed to help though. Driving them hours to find support groups, countless hours of confrontations, any piece of advice he could scrounge from any corner of his brain, even going through the effort of painstakingly hiding all their drugs, all for naught. He liked to believe that everyone was worth it, that anybody could change, but what in any universe could you do when somebody didn’t want to change? It wasn’t all a waste, was it?

It was confounding the way {{user}} looked at him now. Half-lidded eyes peering up at him plaintively, silently begging for the answers he always seemed to have. A quick fix, a short proverb with some epiphanic effect that would have them determined to live life again.

In the end, all he could do was weep.