Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror

by Mark Matthews

Horror isn't about extreme sadism; it's about extreme empathy.

Bookstores and libraries provided succor, a spiritual peace that saw us return to something almost human, cowed by the awe of a hundred thousand voices clamoring to be heard above the din of reverent quiet.

I wanted to fuck and sleep and get high and die, and none of that mattered either. If art requires you to be still, then life demands motion, given that there’s far more of one than the other.

None of that can expel the nagging feeling that something’s missing from you, something’s not right.

You live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, of being a passenger on the wrong train looking longingly out the window at all the happy people traveling the right one. For no good reason, you randomly find it difficult to breathe.

Sobriety is a world of sharp edges and pain, and I will never understand why you wouldn’t avoid it if you had the choice.

She can tell that he has no one who thinks about him.

Ouch

It wasn’t the drugs and it wasn’t even the cancer. She died of “complications.” You never asked to know what that means. You figured there’s no point. She’s dead. And death is simple. Life is what’s complicated.

Her words swung like a pendulum inside a grandfather clock, one side then the other, to believing what she said, to wishing it were true.

Like waking up hungover, sprawled across someone’s cheap-ass Ikea throw rug, my eyes fluttering open onto its weave of coarse fibers twisted together with cat fur and curls of pubic hair.

We’ve all been there, right?

Love was a crematorium that lit you up and burned you out at the same time.

The sun yawned and cooed about it being a busy day. It slid cozily behind the horizon.