Hi @letalis-laetitia

You transcend the good/bad of the prompt so wonderfully, showing what might be perceived as a bad habit is just as much a result of circumstances. The difference between Row and Charley is so faint, as though either could have walked the others path.

This also shows how a well written (and I do feel justified, though a little arrogant😉, in classifying my own story as such) can transcend the writer's intended meaning but create equally poignant realizations in the reader. You're completely right, Charley and Row could both have ended up in each other's position, with the lucky break. And I was cognizant of showing that Row understood this and tried to let Charley know this fact. Tried to let him know that he didn't see a homeless guy, but an old friend!

As I wrote, the bad habit for me was Row (lol Rowan me basically) habit to do crazy things sometimes, to have a lack of impulse control that can get him into trouble. Did this come across?

Or did you see Charley's Heroin addiction as the main bad habit that was subverted to something positive in the end?

I guess both could be true and both are meaningful.

The shower scene is so very powerful, (lol not a sentence said and meant this way that often) and not just for all the emotion is hits with, but the normality of Charley, how the life he lives isn't one he lives by choice but through fear, and feeling like there is a lack of another option, is probably very true for a lot of people. It feels like it wasn't the life he wanted, but he had embraced it anyway, because it was better than the alternative. There is such a depth of personal/emotional redemption, washing away the hurt with the dirt, and letting it all go, its a really beautiful moment.

I'm going to recycle something I said in my comment back to Carol here but with a few addendums. This was my favorite scene, and it actually had me in floods of tears writing it, and at the time I didn't know why.

I have faced addiction in my life, but nothing as extreme as Heroin. But I have known people, good friends, who've become smackheads, as we call them in Liverpool. They are ostracized and demonized, but what no one will face is the societal conventions that push people with that tendency toward addiction. True it is something of a choice, I would never suggest otherwise. When some people are at their lowest ebb they sometimes turn to hard drug addiction, as Charley talks about in his internal monologue. But as you point out it is a choice driven by fear, it is something felt at the time as the only option left to them, and I've felt like that once in my life, and I chose to deaden with drugs... but in a lesser way with habitual ecstasy and cocaine use, pretty much weekly.

Some people choose suicide. That is the other option when someone reaches that level of inability to escape the fear that has become entrenched in their lives on a deep psychological level.

There are a few ways to deaden yourself but the people who choose this deadening are often prone to depression, or they're weak in regards to impulse control, but they can also be some of the strongest people psychologically, especially if they get beyond their addiction. Anyway, it made me cry because I recognized it was just a deeply suppressed memory from an experience I had over ten years ago when I decided I would stop taking certain substances every week to modify my life and block out certain things. I was like Charley at one point, I deadened myself to the pressures of societal expectation:

Expectations; parents, peers, teachers and friends. No memory of failing. No memory of falling in love, a part of you dying each time that feeling disappeared and above all, a window wiper to fear. That's what it was to be a drug addict, running from that fear, that truth, which every human must eventually face. There is nothing more to this life than a brief fleeting lucid dream.

I feel like psychological fear is one of the worst malidies. It prevents you from living fully and it negates joy. Anyway, that shower scene was a memory buried deep that resurfaced through the writing, I didn't even remember that I had a similar washing away experience while taking a shower until today when I re read this story.

The ending is just perfect, the difference that human connection makes, it really made me reflect on myself, thank you.

I'm glad. I didn't know if it was too cheesy. I didn't know if it was just a little too Irvine Welsh trainspotting-esque but I wanted it to reflect the simple joy that can be found in just bringing someone back from the brink. Not for any feeling of superiority, just to see them in a moment of joy. To relive memories of joy and re-ignited friendship.

Thanks for reading and for your meaningful comment and review. It's honestly comments like this that keep me writing on steem 🙂