when I thought it wouldn’t last three days: come february I celebrate three years sobriety…

I’m an alcoholic. Even after three years my hands still cringe before I type, my heart gives way when I open my mouth to speak. But I stutter and kick the words out of my mouth, pound them on the page, because I need to. I refuse a whisper, to have my mouth swallow words like waves. So I’ll play fakir if I have to. I’ll jackhammer. I’ll break barren ground. I’ll ferret because they — I am an alcoholic — are only words, shapes, sounds, air.

I will not go quietly.

I remember those first few months. I was a shivering mess of a thing. I kept fidgeting; I was prone to hysterics and bursts of rage, because this what you do when you suffer unimaginable loss. This is how you feel when you’ve lived the whole of your life married to an anesthetic. And suddenly you find yourself reduced to a slab on an operating table, ready for the cutting. There is no ether. There is no sweet pill dissolving on your tongue. This is you, done to the bone. And you realize you can feel yourself bleed, that there is actual pain associated with living that you couldn’t smother and snuff out. You tell anyone who will listen that there is no pain like this. But something made you bite down. Made you keep going.

Maybe it was that morning after when I collapsed into tears. On the phone my best friend told me that it wouldn’t have been so bad had I not drunk those last two glasses of wine. If I had only stopped. The words hung there, desperate to cleave to something, but instead my body convulsed and shook. And it was if I opened my mouth and moth balls fluttered out when I said I couldn’t stop. I remember how saying those small words shocked me, because I had convinced myself that I had a “drinking situation”, “a problem”, “a momentarily lapse in reason” – I never wanted the finality of those three words: I’m an alcoholic, because who wants that? An end, a fade to black, a business of leaving.

And then six months passed and I tell you this: I could see, and feel and hear and touch and taste. It was as if I had spent a decade asleep and I had suddenly woken up, hurling myself back into life. Imagine yourself the sole passenger on a plane; you’re cruising altitude, complacent. This is your drinking life, your numb, waking life. And then the plane breaks sky, is flung into the ocean, explodes from the inside out, and the seconds before life and other you cry out for time, for your life. This is your sobriety. This is you waking up after a catastrophe.

This is you holding your life in your hands rather than surrendering it to a bottle. This is the time your new life begins.

After those first six months, I coasted. I thought this sober life was easy until this year. Until I found myself losing the last vestige of a family. Until I sat for months in front of a computer, staring at a blank page. Going to the bank and seeing my savings fade to nothing. Coming home to myself and only myself. I never felt tested until I felt lost, unimaginably so, and there was a whole month where I had to write down on my hand, on slips of paper, on my goddamn bathroom mirror: You will not drink. You cannot drink. You cannot lose all that you have built. You cannot go through this crash again.

I cannot go back.

Even typing this now, the weight of this, nearly breaks me. Because I have to remind myself that addiction doesn’t go away, it simply lies dormant. It’s a lover begging for reconciliation. It’s a tireless, patient, abusive lover waiting for an in. Waiting for that first flinch. It wants to say, but I am the one thing that has never left you.

And although I’m at such a grounded, good place in my life, I can never be complacent.

Come December I will be 34. Come February I will be 3. And I treasure this — all that comes before and all that is now, and all that is before me.

And after I hit “publish” on this post, I realized this: alcoholic is just one word. But there are other words! Strong, smart, funny, effusive, creative, passionate, kind. And those words are loud, beautiful, and brave.

Obviously, it’s Friday and I wouldn’t spend it any other way than writing out my thoughts, lighting candles (right now it’s James Boyce Candle in Chef’s Special by Voluspa), and clutching a hot cup of tea.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 9:28 pm and is filed under daily murmurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.