In my second session with Just John, he wore a pink button up shirt bright enough to blind me and aggravate my dope sick headache. The buttons stretched and pulled across his broad chest and his sleeves were wrinkled and bunched, probably because he kept pushing them up his meaty forearms. I kept my itchy, watering eyes on the little stack of notebooks on his desk to avoid looking directly at him and his stupid shirt.

I had been clean for almost three weeks, and my mind had officially declared war on the rest of my body. Exhaustion plagued me, but I couldn't sleep, and I'd been wandering my house aimlessly the last few nights, grappling with a seemingly inhuman desire to stick needles in my arms - not even to get high, but just so I could stop feeling like I was dying a thousand times over. A different inhuman desire kept me from doing it, and I started to think that maybe I was wrong about how love was supposed to feel. Not someone who you clung to even if they caused you pain, but rather someone who made pain feel like nothing more than a summer breeze on the back of your neck.

"This is the reality of recovery, Kai," Just John said. "You've heard the phrase it gets worse before it gets better?"

I swallowed the bile burning the back of my throat and nodded.

"Make no mistake about it, what you're doing is incredibly difficult," he continued. "It's difficult to let go of something that's been a need at the center of your life for so long."

His words gave me goosebumps. I immediately thought of Sage, and the way she felt like a combination of all the drugs I'd ever done, from the high all the way down to the crash. In my moments of clarity, I knew she was worse for me than heroin and Xanax and cocaine, but I couldn't let go, despite the fact that my moments of clarity were starting to come more often and linger longer.

"Could it be a person?" my words came out meeker than I intended them to. "I mean, could you be addicted to a person?"

Without missing a beat, he replied, "Do you think you are?"

"I-I...don't know."

Just John rubbed his stubbled chin with his hand. "Well, love addiction is real, and it can come in several forms. People who find that they can't let go of someone, either out of fear or desperation, are considered obsessive or codependent love addicts."

"But I'm not obsessed with her," I blurted out.

"It's not what you think it is," he explained, and the more even he kept his tone, the more I wanted to fly off the handle. "Obsessive love addicts simply cannot let go of their partner, no matter how toxic the relationship may be."

My head spun and throbbed, and suddenly the light in his office was unbearable, like I was staring into the sun.

"So you're telling me..." I croaked out, the words like sandpaper against the back of my throat. "You're telling me I could never smoke, huff, or swallow any fucking drug ever again, and I'd still be an addict."

"Don't think of it like that Kai." Just John as even-tempered as ever, and that really made me lose it. "That's the whole point of doing all of this, so we can-"

"No, no there is no fucking point," I snapped. "I'm addicted to something I can't even go to fucking rehab for. Once I kick one habit, I'll probably just move on to the next one. And the one after that and the one after that. So what's the fucking point?"

He tried to reason with me, but a star had just exploded in my head, and suddenly it was too hot and too loud and too much of everything I hated. It was too much of me, too much of everything that was wrong with me, and I couldn't handle it.

I jumped up from the chair across from Just John's desk, knocking it over and tearing out of the rehab center like Jason Voorhees was after me. My mom sat in her car in the parking lot with her head in a book.

"You're done early, what happened?" she asked when I slumped into the passenger seat.

"Nothing," I grunted. "Just take me home."

I blasted the AC and pressed my forehead to the window, watching the blur of the city fly by. We crossed the bridge back to Folly Beach, and I wondered what it would be like if I jumped from the guard rail. Maybe I'd go under and come back to the surface a different person.

I didn't even go into the house when we got home.

"Kai, you need to eat," my mom called after me. "I made lasagna."

"Can't, I'm working."

I went straight for the backyard and my art shed, closing the door and locking it behind me. I plucked a half-finished oil painting from one of my drying racks and set it down on an easel in front of my paint splattered stool. It had no color, just shades and hues from white to grey to black, something more muted and intimate to fit the faceless entwined couple I had created. Something I wanted - obsessed over - and I couldn't even give them a face, plus it needed better shading, but that wasn't my concern anymore.

I dropped to my knees and started thumping on the panels of wood flooring of the shed, looking for the slightest rattle that gave away my hiding spot. Once I found it, I grabbed and scraped at the wood until it broke free, nearly tearing off my nails in the process. The dirt under the shed was hard and cold, but I dug at it until I hit the glass jar I buried there. In case of emergencies.

If I was going down, I was going down hard.

My hands shook as I cut a line on another half-finished canvas, the white powder like snow against the grays and blues of the paint. It smelled like vinegar, and I didn't know how old it was, but my anger and my pain and my desperation outweighed any sense I had left. I rolled up a dollar from my wallet and snorted it all in one go.

I wheeled my stool back to my canvas, and the paint began to melt and drip off the canvas into my hands. The pounding in my head stopped, and the ceiling of the shed grew another 10 feet tall. The pulsing of my heart echoed off the walls. Everything moved in slow motion, even my hand as I reached for a paintbrush from my jar, knocking over another one in the process.

I made a mess. The mess was me.

✗✗✗

For starters, I was in my underwear. At some point I must have sweated out a fever, and my clothes sat discarded underneath my desk. When I lifted my head off the desk, I immediately saw the room spin. Paint clung to my hands and my hair, but the red on my fingertips was bright and smelled like metal. It was all over my chest too, and when I brought my hand to my face, I found its source - my nose.

The weight of what I had done started to suffocate me, but when I saw my unfinished oil painting, now just coated in streaks of white, yellow, gray, and actual bloody fingerprints, I saw nothing but that same red, and I screamed.

I kicked the door to my art shed open, greeted with an unholy blast of morning sunlight. I chucked the oil painting onto the grass, then grabbed another unfinished painting and threw it next to the other one. Rage blinded me, and before I knew it I had a pile of 15 canvases, notebooks, and whatever shit I could grab in immediate proximity. I grabbed the can of gasoline for the lawnmower and drenched everything in it.

I went back inside the shed, grabbed my cigarettes and a match, and lit the match, watching it burn for a moment or two before dropping it into the pile.

Fire engulfed it all almost immediately, and I sat in my yard in my underwear, smoked a cigarette, and watched it all burn.