Fighting A Secret War

The cycle is so perfect you could set your watch to it.  Dry out, take care of yourself, see some results at the gym, start eating better, making the most of your time, find a new job, get good at that job, reconnect with friends and find small things to be happy about every day.  You have created and assembled a version of yourself that is good and worthy.

And then you get tired of that version of yourself or it gets too exhausting to get up every day or some thing, some bad day, some bad experience, some nasty little imp finds you and gets in you and begins the whispers and the chants and grows into the Monster.

And when it is fully grown and has taken You over, its howl of victory is just this, “I think I’ll get some beer on the way home.”

The next week or two weeks or month disappear.  All the events and birthdays and gatherings go on without you as you rail and lash out at the unguilty, uncaring world.  You claw at the settled earth and break open the tombs of your past and shake the bones of things that can never be resolved.  You are shoved back and forth between fits of laughter and bouts of sobbing.  A need for touch makes you slip down the stairs of lust, and yet your anger at everyone except yourself causes you to alienate and hurt people who care about you.  And if you haven’t killed yourself or anyone else, you get so sick that you can do nothing but lay there, and your shame is complete.

The next week you spend shivering, vomiting, shitting and crying.  You are a ghost of yourself.  You wander around the house like a pathetic vampire in his castle, watching re-runs and drinking Pedialyte, waiting for your body to collapse.

And then eventually you suppose you can’t hide any longer, and go outside for something simple.  You do it again the next day.  You find out if you still have a job.  You reach out to a few people to make sure you’re still friends.

I feel like my life is not my own so often.  It’s a pervasive thought.  I want to help and please everyone so my time is often devoted to other people.  And it gets out of hand a lot.  Weeks go by and I haven’t taken a moment for myself, or I feel guilty for wanting to take time for myself.

And when it comes to a head and I can’t stand it anymore, drinking myself into blackness feels like the only way to reclaim my life.  The only way I can take it back is to destroy it a little, that way people look and go “eww okay, maybe I don’t want him around.”

Poetry by Margaret Atwood

Stories about relationships much sadder than mine

A YouTube playlist of songs that reminded me of you, that still remind me of you, that you were only mildly interested in hearing

The table is laid out with newspaper, a mason jar filled with water, a coffee cup with paintbrushes spiraling around its edge, a crusted over palette, pots of paint, a magnifying glass, and little figurines.  It’s a silent hobby mostly.  Just my breathing and the almost indistinguishable sound of the brush.  I don’t play the games they’re associated with, I just see something cool and buy it and paint it.  And it’s what I’m doing tonight, while my partner is almost certainly out with someone else.  I’m older now, so things don’t feel as fatal as they did.  Lies and betrayals aren’t as...Shakespearean.  But I’m still hurt, in my own quiet way.  

I look up occasionally; focusing on the smaller details on the figures can strain the eyes.  Across the room, I see a darkness.  I see a teeming darkness.  I try to ignore its approach but I can hear the sound of bottles clinking together, the hiss and sigh of cans being opened.  I hear the creatures whispering how good it would feel to just forget all this, to remove the part of your mind that cares.

Maybe after a few drinks you’d have the courage to do something about this.

Every time I drank, I wanted to lose inhibitions yes, maybe be more social and forward yes, be loose and laughing yes, but mostly I wanted to keep drinking until I went into a deep, dark place.  It was different than blacking out and losing time or passing out somewhere and waking up on a couch or on the bathroom floor.  I liked to be in bed, in my room, spinning in the dark and feeling myself sink further and further into a place where my mind didn’t race and I didn’t dream and I could be at peace.  A small taste of death.

After my surgery I would do the same thing with the painkillers.  Granted, I was in real physical pain, but I would always pop a few extra before bed.  I’d be swimming in warmth, suddenly okay with the fact that I was permanently disfigured and just...okay with everything.

Too often I find myself chasing my breath and silently, desperately trying to get my thoughts under control, panicking in some grocery store aisle or at the gym.  Everything disintegrates, death is certain, one day no one will remember, one day there will be no such thing as memory.  And I can’t go one day without those thoughts slapping me in the face like a dead fish.

When you’re in the drink, people don’t really hassle you about anything else but your drinking.  Sobriety is the highest hope they have for you, the goal they want you to shoot for, your biggest flaw for lacking.  Everything else is too delicate a subject.  Your depression or the money you make (or don’t make) or the dozens upon dozens of other things in your life that are not in order are triggers that might send you on a REAL bender and lord knows what happens then, death or jail, so let’s not even mention it.

But when you finally get some sober time under your belt, you spend enough time outside your cave, above water, not in whatever depths you dive to, that’s when the complaints and demands begin.  How many semesters of school left, when are you going to get a better job, find a better place to live, date someone better for you, grow up, quit on some of those loftier dreams, lock yourself into a drone role so they can cast you out of their hearts and stop worrying about you.

I’m doing all I can not to really get back into my bottles and drink myself to death.  I’m doing all I can to ensure I won’t lose another decade of my life to drinking.  I’m doing all I can to achieve some kind of higher station in life.  I’m doing all I can to not be that guy who is passed out on a futon covered in his own puke and piss.  I’m trying to look forward to every new, sober day.

And yet that’s not enough.  Every day some kind of criticism or shame or some form of “y’know, you really could be doing better.”  A better job, a better place to live, a better girlfriend, a fast forward button on my education, etc.  But this IS better.  This is me undoing twenty years of bad decisions, this is me doing the best I can, this is me not giving up and going back to being either blacked out or hungover, despite every atom of my body begging me to be that guy again.

There’ a lot of beer in the fridge left over from New Year’s that I haven’t touched.  I allowed myself a few drinks while I was out and the next thing I know it’s 9AM on the first day of 2018 and I’m sitting in a pile of beer cans.  I went to look around and see what I’d done; if I’d thrown up on the carpet or broken a glass or burnt food and left it on the stove, but everything seemed in order.

When I got to the refrigerator I saw what I had gotten up to.  Somewhere during the evening I had bought enough beer to kill a frat house, which means I left right after midnight (you ALWAYS leave early to buy more before they stop selling) and spent the rest of the cash I had on booze.  I can’t fit hardly anything in the fridge.

I haven’t touched it since, nor have I thrown it out.  I don’t want it, but I need it there.  It has to be available to me.  Tomorrow could be a bad day, my money could run out, I could have a friend over, whatever the excuse is...I just need it there IN CASE.  Just because I’m sober now doesn’t mean I’ll want to be sober tomorrow or the next day.

I find little things to keep me from diving in to all that beer.  I’m going to the gym or I need to catch up on real sleep or I make plans with my girlfriend.  It’s the same five or six reasons not to drink, but they work.  And I can’t chip away at them, a few a night, play games, watch a movie.  One beer is ten, at least.  One night of drinking turns into most of the next day.  And the hangover doesn’t last just that next day because I’ll chase the misery away with more alcohol.  And before I realize how fast I’ve begun to spin, I’ve lost an entire week of my life and everything I’ve gathered up has been scattered all over the place.

I can beat the drink, I can beat the taste, I can beat the gallons of death waiting for me.

I can’t beat what makes me a drinker though.  I can’t beat the doubts, the inadequacies, the fears.  As long as I am Me, I will be a drinker.

And some nights all that can be done is for me to seek that self destruction.  No gym, no friends, no books, no Netflix, no stupid distractions from what I really want to do.

I can only run so far before the wolves catch up, and as they surround me, as their howls dissipate when they see their prey is won, they near me and begin to whisper over and over...

I used to sit there in the car, half listening to the radio, my breath stinking up the cab, sweat in the low of my back, saying “hi” and “hello” and “thanks” over and over to see if I was slurring, waiting, waiting, waiting for the clock to tick over to 6:00 AM so I could buy more booze.  God help me if the cashier didn’t unlock the fridges right away, and then I’d have to stand there and wait for him, as if that made the whole thing any more pathetic.  And who was I kidding, if I had any shame about it I would have just accepted I was done for the night/morning and gone to bed.  But my drinking is powerful and my stubbornness is beyond me somehow, because I’m not done until I say I am good and done and as long as I can stand and speak and manage polite small talk with other people, then I am not fucking done.  I lose the entire day sleeping it off, and I wake up the following day with my clothes on, and a pile of dirty laundry as a pillow.

crying on the inside?

Because your face is so still and calm

In the gym of all places, I had a bit of a realization.  I’m chatting back and forth with someone and she’s become very forward with me.  I love flirting, I love the games people play when they’re attracted to each other.  But when one becomes a naked aggressor, offering or propositioning with no uncertainties, I withdraw.  As a man, I think I should view this, we’ll say “enthusiasm,” a big giant Bat Signal sized green light, as a welcome invitation but it actually scares me.  I don’t want to speak to this person anymore, let alone sleep with them because of how uncomfortable I felt, like having to stand on an anthill as they swarm my body.

A few years ago I would have been driving home from the club right about now, having kissed a silent stranger, having shared cigarettes and exchanged numbers, having finished a bottle of whiskey with another waiting at home.  Or none of these things, another night of money almost wasted, if not for the buzz.  And I was unstoppable and fearless and innocent.

At some point, you decide enough is enough.  Your insides hurt and even standing up is a terrifying exercise.  So you fight through a few days of the shakes, of sleeplessness, of your chemistry being absolutely fucked, of aching boredom, and after a while you make it out the other end.  You’re sober.  You find other things to occupy your time, you start falling asleep despite the internal din, you start feeling productive.  Maybe you don’t need to drink.

And then it’s 3AM and you’re bored on Snapchat and see that your crush posted a video of her sucking some guy off because he dared her to.  Mere seconds and everything you had built is knocked over.  You realize that all your decisions have been stupid, that you’re still emotionally fucked, that even if you regain control of yourself, there is absolute, wide eyed horror just inches away from you at any given time.