An old leather-bound ledger: 2,151 entries. Not addiction, not rebellion—obedience. Father’s curriculum: drink more, dominate more, fuck more. Mother’s footnote: women are cold, rejecting, prefer absence. The formula set early—masculinity as consumption plus domination, divided by her disappointed silence. Every encounter a chemical shout against the void she left and the cage he built: I am here. See my damage? It proves I am a man.
Hidden column: the men. Grip on the neck, proving “you’re my bitch”—purest execution of the script. Connection was never intimacy; it was a weapon, a fortress of flesh where he could be alone inside someone and never found wanting. Thirty-four years clean, recovery didn’t erase the math—it exhausted the bodies. The numbers stopped adding up to a feeling, only fatigue. With 2,151 amends impossible, the honest report: the damage isn’t something he did. It’s what he is—built from their equation, performing an autopsy on the monster only to find the blueprint in his own hands.