When you drink every night you never really recover. It's subtle, but life is a permanent hangover. There's no headache. No pounding, except in your chest as you worry and wonder if or when it will end. But there's a cloud that follows you. Your life is coated in it. That grey, dismal atmosphere pervades. No sunlight can find its way through.

My biggest problem is that I've never wanted to live. And that creates an ideal breeding ground for addiction.

No, really, I've never wanted to live. I've done it out of obligation to family. Because the time I tried to end it and didn't succeed I saw the pain in my wife's face and swore I'd never cause her that kind of pain again.

Course, later on, I'd break that promise and try once more to rid the world of myself. Myself of it. I only succeeded in watching my wife leave me. There's nothing more humiliating than trying to kill yourself and failing.

It certainly makes one hesistant to try another time. Especially as you get older. Become an adult. Trying and failing could prove to be a worse punishment than just simply living.

So now I kill myself slowly. Steathily as it were. And no one notices that I'm dying.

And that is how it must be, since facing the truth would kill more than just me.

But now the truth is out and so the secret fades into the harsh reality that the process of slowly just doesn't cut it anymore.