Down the Rabbit Hole

The Agony of the Untold

Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise
Day 677 January 13, 2016
Prompt: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Maya Angelou Do you agree?

I agonize over this all the time mostly because I feel I can't really process anything until I write about it. Writing is my last stage of dealing with anything important in my life, when I write about it I can then let it go. A few years ago, before my marriage and my daughter, I experienced a very intense relationship with an addict that ended in his death. That story, my story of that experience, is one I've only told in isolated pieces. The entire journey however is something I always planned to memorialize for myself but also for people like me who have loved and lost through addiction. The experience changes you fundamentally, in good and bad ways. The fact that I've never gotten the whole story out like that haunts me. I don't know if it agonizes me, that seems so strong a word to use when so much time has passed, but it haunts me as something I've yet to do for myself, for Seth.


Blogging Circle of Friends
DAY 1155 January 13, 2016
Prompt: "Tire tracks in the desert sand." Write a story or poem using these words somewhere within it. Be creative and have fun.


It had been a long time. He had lost count of how many times he had pulled his phone from his pocket to check the time. It had alarmed him how slowly time was passing. William cracked open his paperback and begin reading, desperate to ignore the shaking in his limbs and throbbing thirst.


Agent Hurst bent down to examine the strange pattern of tire tracks in the desert sand. They looked deep, as if made by a heavy vehicle, maybe one of those over-sized SUVs or even a cargo van. He looked over at the still smoking remains of the victim's convertible Cadillac and the team of forensic techs swarming over it like carrion bugs in their white suits and booties. Agent Hurst took out...

William's phone vibrated in his pocket, startling him out of his story. He fished it from his pocket and looked at the incoming call. His mother, of course. The woman had a uncanny and wholly unwelcome way of calling him at the worst possible times. Before he could answer, a petite nurse dressed in blue scrubs stepped into the waiting room and called his name. The nurse seemed surprised to see how young William was, she had clearly been expecting someone older, someone sicker, someone more obviously in need of the medication she dispensed.

She held open the doors to the clinic's inner sanctum and beckoned William to follow her inside. The bleak hallway smelled like antiseptic and something else, something William could not name but it turned his guts to water all the same. He loathed this place, all the more because he needed it so badly. Without the clinic, without the drugs they allocated him, William was only one bad afternoon away from the next epic relapse. William had come too far to fall back again. Aside from that, he knew with every fiber of his fragile being, that he would not survive another relapse and he would go to his grave bearing the agony of his story untold.