I'm writing a paper when the phone rings. It's Sunday, voice warm and deep and... I detect a quietness, a hesitancy, guilt maybe, that isn't ordinarily there. I pull myself into bed with the phone, huddle under the covers. I am shaking. It has been a rough couple of days since we last talked, partially his fault, maybe? I can't tell you- there were hormones involved too and none of it really makes sense. I blame it on my period and he says "I'm really sorry to hear that darlin" and sounds like he means it.
I ask him about his weekend, about his birthday and the shame rises in his voice and he mumbles something fast about it being long and drinking too much and questionably legal activities. I say "what was that?" and then, because my brain has been addled the last couple days, "whatever if you're not going to tell me." But then he spills out in a rush, like he meant to tell me all along:
He got too drunk. He did stupid and silly and more or less innocent things that he can't remember and then he punched a guy. And the next night, went to a party with the girlfriend. Drank too much. Punched another guy and got a bunch of underage girls so drunk they were sitting in a corner crying because... because he thought that was better than the possible alternatives- because he was afraid of what he or the other guys might be unable to keep themselves from doing to them once intoxicated.
It used to be he'd get too drunk and have to be restrained from kissing a girl or two. Now what? I worry for who he is becoming, who he has become, particularly how he's thinking about girls and sex and wondering what separates me from those girls except a couple of years and a refusal to drink anything an alcoholic pours into my cup. But it doesn't make me care any less for him. It makes me feel like he needs that caring more than ever now to help him learn to take care of himself.
But no one ever said caring was letting someone get away with what they shouldn't.
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