It’s a gloomy summer still in August. Way passed “June Gloom”. I went on a walk today. One foot in front of the other. I was next to my mother. My dad and my brother, well, they weren’t home. They are pure. Unlike me and my mother. My brother goes to meet a friend to play tennis. My dad visits his friend’s dad; an old man he likes to keep company. The second they leave, believing my mother and I will make good choices, her and I watch out the window to make sure they drove off and away. Not much longer we have our walking shoes out and we are out the door. But no, we are not going out for a nice, summer walk. It’s gloomy anyway, so why not be gloomy ourselves? One end of our street has a post office, and the other side, a market. Our house is in the middle. Both places being a little over half a mile away. We head towards the market because the post office doesn’t sell booze. We wouldn’t have gone out to walk if we didn’t have a bottle to go home with as a reward. Tequila being the chosen trophy. We get to the market in a relaxed state. Ask the cashier for a bottle of tequila of which the brand name I don’t remember. My mom changes her mind, but not for the better. “Actually...”, she says. “I’ll take two and save is another trip.” We pick up a small container of ice cream and two large gatorades. The ice cream for me, and the two fruit punch gatorades for her because “she needs the electrolytes.” “What am I doing?”, I asked myself. Now I understand all those years she was watching me hurt myself and chose to enable me because she didn’t would rather me stay close and unhurt than to stop me and risk me shunning her. I kept my mouth shut, and wrongfully so. I need to learn how to say “no”. We go to pay. The cashier asks us if we need a bag. My mother declines and takes her designer backpack off and stuffs all of our “treats” into it. Nothing but her wallet and our mandatory masks were in there prior. She is too weak to carry this backpack now, so before she even tries to put it on her back, I put it on mine. She asked me if it was heavy. I told her no. I lied. We walk back home and now she’s in more of a hurry. Paranoid my dad or brother might beat us home, even though we logically knew that they both would be gone for hours. I now see behaviors in her that I saw in myself before. The mind of a paranoid addict is enough to drive a person mad. We get home, and as I knew, no one was there. As I knew, no one got home until hours after. I take the bottles and pour my mother a single drink and hide the bottles. She did not like this. I did not care. She felt betrayed. I did not care. The reality of her bad health and my no good enabling slapped me across the face. I explained to her why I decided to do this and that if she has a problem with it, I will have no choice but to tell my dad and brother about our little adventure. She did not like that. I did not care. She felt betrayed. I did not care. I told her I loved her too much to let her to destroy herself to death. She understood, thanked me, and gave me a hug. When the boys got home, we told them we went for a walk. They asked where we went. “To the post office and back”, I said.
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