My life as I knew it ended on an unusually snowy day in Fort Collins, Colorado. It was a day spent trucking around town with a pal, to two brewery tours where I sampled light beers, dark beers, and strong beers, while sending out nostalgic post cards. The tours were followed by several bars where I took down cocktails, shots of Maker’s Mark, and a seventy dollar bottle of Cabernet at my friend’s apartment. In the morning, I woke up with a pounding headache, struggling to get to the bathroom in time to vomit the berry colored wine into my friend Luci’s toilet, before boarding a plane back to Chicago. This was my last day drinking. It was not an unfamiliar occurrence to wake with these headaches, to loathe the sunlight as it strengthened the tightness in my temples, and to have an odd sense of detachment from reality. I was like a shadow shifting from plane to various plane of life experiences, aching and emotionally isolated, not fully able to feel them. It can be likened to a bad relationship.
I write in a diary and have since I was eleven. I have been involved in several very unhealthy relationships, and I’ve written at length about them in these diaries. I write about the problems in the relationship, from the beginning, or a few weeks in as they become apparent. These problems often evolve or grow larger, and I continue to write about them, but here’s the thing: In these dysfunctional relationships, the story is seamless. 2004: He was a shithead/ 2008: He was a shithead. You mean to tell me, that I could have written this entry yesterday and that the story has not changed? I could have saved myself four years of yelling and pain and the occasional broken Correll dish? It’s completely arbitrary. I needed those experiences over the course of certain relationships to know that nothing was going to change.
This piece is about my relationship with alcohol. It is likened to my bad relationships with certain lovers as I’ve written about my drinking habits for years now. I have spent a night in jail, thrown wine bottles in alleys and at a lover, gotten kicked out of bars, gone to counseling, and placed myself in many ridiculously dangerous situations. And I have woken up many, many, many days disillusioned, tired, my heart pounding through my chest, my hands shaky - looking like complete hell. The story is the same from the beginning: He was a shithead.
I am and have committed to quitting drinking for the rest of my life. It seems like a long time, but a friend of mine put it best: simply, it’s REALLY not that long. I am not someone who can drink, and if this decision is every questioned in the slightest, by me, all I have to do is reference my writings, my experiences and memories, to know that alcohol was a very bad lover, and treated me worse than any one or thing has ever treated me, and this is not to say it's all 'his' fault, as it never is.
I love him, I really love him. I hate him, I really hate him.
This piece is titled: Blurred and blurred and blurred and blurred. Appropriately so.