Something about Dr. Chase rubs me the wrong way - I don't quite like his personality. So, I decided to make him a tad deeper and a touch more troubled.

Introspective, dark and metaphorical. I also took plenty of liberties. If any of those things sound unappealing, then I wouldn't suggest reading.

She was crazy.

It wasn't the sort of crazy that could be explained away with a clinical diagnosis. No, she was a crazy of her very own; it both began and ended with her. She created it, out of misery and loneliness, and she fed it daily with alcohol. It was a routine, I soon came to realize. I suppose that's what kept her from going over the edge of her own dark abyss. There was a kind of predictable sanity in the certainty of pattern, of predetermination. It kept her living, even if only for a few years more.

But living, I soon learned, was so easy to simulate.

I don't remember when it started, her little sham of the living. And I don't suppose I even remember when she was truly sane. Wasn't she once? Perhaps she never was. Perhaps she was always pretending, and when it finally happened, when her false world of love and family finally disintegrated, she stopped feigning ignorance to her own dementia. She let it envelop her completely. There must have been a strange sort of freedom in letting go.

I wondered if that's what she would have use to justify it if she ever were to be asked why. And I would watch her carefully in the morning, when she would break what she deemed the "faulty" eggs on the kitchen floor every time she attempted to make breakfast. I knew then that there couldn't ever be a justification. She would grab my arm hastily and pull me aside.

"Don't let them see you - don't let them see you."

Her breath burned my ears when she hissed into them. But I never answered her. I wanted to pretend that she was only drunk again and nothing more. It was normal, it was all so very normal.

I remember the first time she tried to kill herself. It was a halfhearted attempt - a quick slit of her left wrist, not hard enough to do any real damage, but just enough to leave a scar behind so she could always remember her other failure. There wasn't much left in the world for a woman who failed at everything, including her own death. I remembered kneeling next to her, holding her wrist tightly, trying to make the blood disappear. I remembered not feeling much of anything as it ebbed from her and rolled down my fingers. It felt pleasantly warm. It was normal for us, it was normal for a boy to try to save his mother from dying every other day.

Children are always so blissfully stupid. I was no exception.

I hated her. I hated her weakness, I hated her addiction, I hated the way she looked at me whenever she let her own delusions go too far - a pathetic mixture of pity and disgust was always in her face. I hated her for it. I silently begged her to just kill herself and be done with it, instead of dragging it out longer. She forced me down with her, although I never knew why; it was where I couldn't breathe, it was where I had no voice that could reach her ears. She'd stare in the bathroom mirror for hours, under the sickly glow of florescent lights, and place her hands palm-flat on either side of the sink. I didn't know what she saw of herself in that mirror, but whatever it was it always frightened her, always convinced her to drink more. It was dark where she was and I had to stand by and drown with her.

I often wondered what she thought of that little boy besides her, at all ungodly hours of the night, watching her with no real emotion as she allowed herself to fall deeper. I wondered if she ever noticed me there. My father had left her and she had abandoned me in her own craziness, so I suppose she was alone, even if I was always there watching her curiously.

She had been killing herself for years, slowly drowning in alcohol. And when she finally had succeeded in something, when she finally had succeeded in her own death, that was when I loved her. But didn't you always love what you no longer had? I stopped blaming her and started blaming him.

How can you hate the dead, anyway?

I couldn't totally escape what she left behind for me, however. I'd wake up years after everything, tasting alcohol in my mouth. That's when I realized that I wasn't sleeping dreamlessly anymore. Her dark abyss was her legacy to me, something left behind to remind me that I could be crazy, too, if I decided one day that pretending to be sane just didn't have the same appeal anymore.

It left me feeling cold, but I suppose it was better than drowning in alcohol.