“Worms”

The past seems like a bad dream only partially recollected: little fragments worm their way up from my subconscious and back into the daylight of the present from time to time, withering away almost as rapidly as they break the surface. The little pits and holes they carved are miniscule, yet multitudinous, and through this tangled labyrinth of tiny, meandering holes and pits I can almost see my inner self, the other me that was born of suffering and nurtured by addiction, festering inside of my mind.

He’s tired and sickly, dying of starvation in the depths of my head, but he’s vengeful, too, and so I must remain vigilant, so that bastard doesn’t steal the helm. Even though I beat him once, I doubt my ability to win another war of that magnitude.

I think every recovering addict has another person inside of them, like a warped reflection of their true self, as seen in a not-so-funhouse mirror. That inner nightmare-person is an entity entirely separate in most of us from our normal being. We say and do things we never thought we could sober, and not for the better. Recovery is simply the act of battling with oneself: light versus dark, man versus monstrous counterfeit. But we never really win. We just lock that bastard away and starve it out. Sure, it whispers to us, and sends its worms to probe for weakness in our hearts and minds, but we must endure We must mend the wormholes and snuff out these vermin at their first appearance.

It is through subconscious subterfuge that the addict enslaves the recovered, and often only through brute force and dumb luck that we seal the monster back into its crypt.