![]() I’m in the gymnasium where the old-timers, who got sober before I was born, talk about their home repairs. I’m in a hospital cafeteria for a Sunday meeting, looking at the evergreens through gargantuan panes of institutional glass, three weeks sober and not ready to talk about what it was like but confident enough to say there is no God, but there are spirits everywhere, and hardly any of them love us. There is too much happening in my brain for sleep. ![]() I never went back to the bar where I drank it, but there’s a dollhouse in my brain where I am still on the barstool, deciding I’ll find my way back to my car in the morning and taxi home tonight. ![]() One day, I had my last whiskey and never had one again. I stretched the time loops of my drinking and quitting onto a structure that gave my life meaning There was nothing to talk me out of or through. I couldn’t recall most of their faces or where we met, so I didn’t call. I don’t remember how it felt, only how expansive the night became as my phone and I lay in bed, and I looked through the first names of women who told me to call them if I wanted to drink. They weren’t severe enough to bring on seizures or DTs, but I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t going through a physical disturbance resulting from a profound change. Mostly, I made the jelly jar my emblem of restraint. Only occasional brownouts, or maybe blackouts, but I wouldn’t know. No more passing out on the bathroom floor with an empty belly and the spins. I’d split a 12-ounce bottle of cider between two jelly jars, one for drinking, the other for saving in the fridge for tomorrow. I don’t remember how it felt, only how expansive the night becameīy the end, I wasn’t drinking very much most nights. A person sits under a tree, arms crossed, turning away from a floating hand that offers a cup. ![]() By April, all my messages about love and death evaporated, and one card made itself known to me every day: the Four of Cups. I read my own cards every day for practice. In early 2015, I bought my first tarot deck after my friend read my cards and turned up the Three of Swords, the stabbed heart. Then, in the restaurant of my memory, the lights go out. I remember the first red Solo cup and the self-breaking power of Everclear and Kool-Aid washing through me, back when my liver was still new enough to meet the liquor like a date with a man you don’t yet know you’ll fear. Maybe I drank because I wanted to sleep-this is one of those things I tell myself when I’m trying to make a story of it. I’ve averaged five and a half hours of sleep a night since that spring when I finished my drinking. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t going through a physical disturbance resulting from a profound change.įor nearly six years now, I’ve been trying to sort all these heavy minutes, and I’ll never get through the backlog that trails behind me and nags that I’ve missed something. ![]()
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