Time ago

I was always a drunk. Well not always. I always liked drink though. It takes courage to be a drunkard, its easy to be a non-drunkard. Or is it the other way round?
I was alright. I had a job. I was a salesman in a telecommunications company. I hear they're doing better without me. I had a wife. A daughter. I still got a daughter. She don't see me much though. She's only 17. But that's when they get strong willed. I want to see her, but she don't want it. Its hard when you got no say in the life of your own daughter. Especially when you once did. I'm watching from afar now, its like watching someone else's daughter grow up.
We had a good house. Everything you could need. Down a nice lane, where the people were nice and relaxed. It was a wide street that stretched on like an ocean. Our house nothing remarkable but everything you needed. Little box garden with its white picket fences and leaning flowers, my wife tended them everyday. I was living in my wife's shadow. She was the breadwinner. She was good at her job, and I cursed her for it and with that curse I got worse at my job every day. And as I got worse at my job I drank more. I thought my daughter was happy but what do I know? I don't understand females in the slightest, not even one that came from my own body. I never understood my wife. I thought we were in love a long time ago. She was only ever in love with herself. Both me and her in love with the same person.
I remember one day awhile ago, I had a hangover. My wife was going mad in the passenger seat but I wasn't listening. I was looking up at my house where a blackbird was perched on the aerial. It kept scanning the road, its head twitching from side to side.
My wife was blaring, "I can't live like this. You can't come in that time of night and expect me to be alright! I worked 10 hours yesterday. You didn't pick up Sandy from school. She was waiting there for hours, they rang me in the middle of a meeting."
That blackbird was as cool as anything, the wind rustling its feathers. I put down my window and shouted out my daughters name but my wife told me she was already in the car. My wife kicked it up a level, "What you waiting for! I'm late!" and all this racket and expletives coming from her mouth, which was once small and delicate.
She hit me and then I started the engine and moved. Drive on, it don't mean nothing, drive on as the great Cash sang. I could have done with some Cash that morning instead of my wife.
That was back in 2005 when I was getting drunk every night. I still didn't realise anything was really going wrong then. The hangovers so bad they seemed to put a shield up over everything else. It was like living in a stupor that protected me. It just didn't protect me from myself.
I remember dropping my daughter off. She hadn't said a word. My wife left the car red in the face and sounded like she lost her voice. I didn't understand it. When she came home from work she was all smiles. Quiet though, her voice was still tired.
Like a fish on a hook. Like a drunk in a midnight choir. That's what I felt like. Like this stuff was happening but I was removed from it all.
I was going downhill and jealousy overcame me. I became jealous at work. These younger guys were selling better than me, more than me. I had no friends there apart from Darry. He was the only one who liked a drink. We went to the races and bars together. But Darry got moved to a different department and I saw him less and less. I was jealous at home as well. As I was making my demise day after day, my wife went from strength to strength. She spent more time at work and going away on trips, meeting with high-fliers. It must have been depressing to see me after all these successful men and then come back to me, drunk as a fiddler. I sat with my back to the world, a glass of whiskey in my hand and the TV as my getaway island.
I woke up next to the train tracks one morning. I couldn't remember how I got there. I thought, 'I hope I didn't try to kill myself.' I was capable of anything back then though.
I'm thinking about going to my doctor soon. First I'll get another drink.