Meditations

day 10. new personal best. 

i still feel like drinking, maybe i don’t get cravings consistently throughout the day but it’s at least always in the back of my mind. facing the world without a friendly haze of booze (or weed) is difficult at best and horrifying at worst. it’s been a lot of years since i’ve had to live in a stark and clear reality. i can say now that i haven’t missed it much. being drunk or high really made the time fly. the days drag. the hours creep. existence is fucking hard. 

a girl, about whom i still don’t know how i feel, said something to me less than 24 hours into my current week and a half of sobriety. she had gotten kind of emotional after we had finished fucking in the back of my shitty ford escort; like the kind of emotional that women get after a good fuck. she was laughing or crying or both at such rapidly changing intervals that i really had a tough time keeping up with her train of thought. at that point, she was still lying to me about her own methamphetamine addiction, i had figured her out within an hour of conversation but let it go, she’d tell me about it when she wanted to. anyway, she looked over at me and said, frankly, “what the fuck is the point of being sober? who cares if you’re an alcoholic? what does it matter?”. i responded quickly, “because i’m better than that. i’m worth more than being a worthless drunk.”. even as i said those words that night, i don’t think i really believed them but it seemed like a decent thing to say. i believe them a little more now. i’m not sure that i’m worth more than shit, truthfully, but maybe if i keep telling myself that i am worth something it will become true. 

a woman, probably in her 60s, today mentioned that after 29 years of sobriety she wished that she had a journal she could look back on. maybe i’ll be able to have something like that one day. we’ll see. 

today was uneventful. although this journal may turn out to be a good suggestion i am starting to dislike the tuesday meeting that i’ve been going to. it’s just way too fucking faith based and i am not at the point where i’m ready to believe/commit myself to a higher power. last week in that room i came out and said i was an atheist. apparently that put it on somebody’s heart to seek me out before the meeting began to highlight a passage from the ‘chapter to the agnostics’. it was meant to encourage the alcoholic to remember that he is not alone when questioning higher powers and faith. well fuck you know? i am aware that millions and millions of people struggle with existential bullshit like this all the time. there is solidarity, but no relief. i could read stories about how specific people came to their faith until my eyes bleed but it wouldn’t help me find a god. someone’s spiritual journey is personal to them and i just can’t believe that reading about how someone else experienced miracles will help me become sanctified. but i couldn’t say any of that to this guy who felt he needed to point that passage out to me, he meant well by it. that meeting may just not be the greatest meeting for me to attend. when i go to meetings, i’m not too sure what i want exactly, but i don’t want to be thinking about my lack of a higher power for an hour straight.

YOU HAVE DONE SO WELL

DON’T LET HER RUIN YOUR PROGESS

YOU HAVE DONE SO WELL

i remember nothing anymore. all of my life, i’ve remembered everything.

you told me once, “when he turns 18 i’m going to look for him, i’m going to find him, he’ll want to know who his mother is”. 

holy. fuck. what kind of delusion were you living in? your son is either dead (after the injuries that either you or your then boyfriend inflicted) or has been adopted by a respectable family. what the fuck do you think that family would tell that boy? (if they’d tell him anything at all about his life before...) that boy was taken from you by CPS when he was only 2 years old. he will NEVER fucking remember you. the only thing he’ll know about his life (before he was saved) is that his mommy was a drug addicted whore and his father will be wasting away in prison until he’s nearly an adult. that’s what his new parents would tell him, and it’s the truth. 

you don’t even know what happened that fucking day. you say you can’t remember. you were so tweeked out, according to you.maybe that’s just an excuse. maybe you do remember, maybe you do remember beating the ever-loving shit out of a small child. 

i saw the fucking pictures VRLA. i fuckin saw them. your kid was turned to mush. HE DID NOT RESEMBLE A HUMAN. seeing that shit, it changed me. i began to think, “holy shit, will this happen to my own progeny?” either you did it, or you (like you say) were on a meth binge and let it fucking happen. you’re culpable regardless. 

you were never a good mother. NEVER. NEVER EVER. poor child, poor son. if he’s not dead - if he EVER learns about his life before his loving, adoptive parents, he will hate you. he will hate you FAR, FAR more than i ever could. 

you were not worthy of helping me raise my own Daughters and Sons. the first time i saw you hold a baby (i remember it well) i couldn’t help but think, “you were party to a beating of someone just like that”. shit. 

all the pictures that you and your grandmother still had hanging in the trailer - you were just fooling yourself and you knew that, because i fucking told you so. that kid will never come back to that hellhole, thank fucking christ, he was nearly killed there. he didn’t even look human after what happened. he looked like fuckin mush. they haunt me, those images i saw from the police records.

ICING OVER A SECRET A PAIN

YOU KNOW YOU DON’T BELONG

YOU’RE THE FIRST TO FIGHT, YOU’RE WAY TOO LOUD

YOU’RE THE FLASH OF LIGHT ON A BURIAL SHROUD  

I KNOW SOMETHING’S WRONG

WELL EVERYONE I KNOW HAS GOT A REASON TO SAY

PUT THE PAST AWAY

I WISH YOU WOULD STEP BACK FROM THAT LEDGE MY FRIEND

YOU COULD CUT TIES WITH ALL THE LIES THAT YOU’VE BEEN LIVIN IN

AND IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE ME AGAIN - 

her and i were at her father’s camper that night. it was late, after work, and cool, cloudless. the camper was perched on a wooded hillside and it was rundown; busted door, broken lights, cracked and moldy siding. there was trash all over the ground. this was the third or fourth time i had been here so the squalor didn’t surprise or impress me. nor did the fact that the father ran that shitty camper’s lights off a small gas generator stir me (i only remember noting that it was puttering away as walked towards the door, meaning he had gotten gas money somehow). i still don’t know where the water in that camper came from. when there was gas, the place was dimly lit and heated by electric space heaters. the place was always a sty. discarded food wrappers, dirty clothes, cut up straws...just a menagerie of shit. 

VRLA and i walked up the half-rusted foldout stairs and through the door. on this night, the father’s young girlfriend was there with her child. he was 3 or 4 years old. carrying my 8 pack of natty light 16oz, 2 of which i had finished on the way over, i sat down at the table and began to live one of the more fucked up times in my life. 

as i drank, the girls chatted about inane bullshit. the father spoke up when he could get a word in. he and the boy had a supper of lunchable pizzas. i was in my own head, mostly silent. i didn’t have anything to say. i was tired and just wanted to listen. 

at one point the girlfriend said, as a sort of aside, to the father “hey can i get that other half now?”. when i had first fallen into madness, i didn’t know what this question meant. but i knew by this time, on this night. i took a pull on my beer as i watched the father step over the boy sitting on the floor and get a small glass slab off the top of the refrigerator. there was a white pill on top. her father gave the slab to his girlfriend and she crossed the camper towards the bathroom. suddenly the little boy got to his feet and started following his mother. the young girlfriend shut the bathroom door and the boy called through it, “mommy! mommy! in! in! mommy!!”. the door was one of those crappy sliding things made out of thin, hard plastic. and by now the boy was trying to push his way into the bathroom, crying “mommy! mommy!”. i then watched as VRLA and her father both got up to pull him away. i listened to her tell the little boy, “no, no. mommy’s busy right now. mommy will be out soon. you can’t go in there, mommy’s busy”.

i can still hear it. such normal speech. no trace of irony. no sense that something was incredibly fucked up here. something happened to me, hearing her speak like that. i felt like my inner soul, MYself, my sense of being, was being sucked out of my head. it felt like i was being torn out of my body, through the back of my skull. i was floating, really floating. i saw the whole dingy room and all it’s trashy people, myself included. i had 360 degree vision. i was outside myself. i can still hear her. i can still hear her father echoing her consolations. 

the bathroom door was pushed open. i snapped back. i was dizzy, drained - fucking exhausted instantly. i started to shiver. neither of them noticed that anything was awry. i wanted to bawl. the girlfriend handed the father back the, now empty, glass slab. she sat down on the couch and began to nod and slump for a few minutes. the little boy sat next to her and laid his head in her lap. that sub (suboxone: an opiate) really fucked her day up. i took long pulls on my beer. i had two left. i wanted to get outta there. 

as i was killing the last pounder, the girlfriend got to her feet and gathered her things. she muttered something about needing to get home to get the boy to sleep. the father said, “be careful babydoll”. she took the boy and left. i sat at the table, drunk and worn out. VRLA and her father chatted. we left shortly after. she drove us home. she didn’t bring up what happened. it didn’t even seem to register with her, at the time it happened or now that we were alone.

i know i am going to be ok. i have forgotten greater loves than this. i have overcome far more terrible heartbreaks. i WILL NOT waste time on this. 

every minute that you cry for her is wasted don’t you know?

i am learning to let go of the anger, to let go of the resentment and pain. when i think of it, i consciously tell myself “DON’T TELL THE STORY”. ‘telling the story’ is something that i had found myself trapped in lately; i’ve been yearning to internalize a narrative about the way shit went down. i didn’t realize how detrimental that was to my mind until just a few days ago. i don’t NEED to the tell the fucking story of what happened, i just need to engage with how the last year of my life had made me feel. there doesn’t need to be any fucking story, any narrative - i.e. personal spin a.k.a. mental gymnastics. i need to just connect with how all of it has made me feel. 

i spent years of my life wallowing in the pain of a love long lost. i REFUSE to do it again. this one isn’t HER, she never was HER, she could’ve never been HER. this one was just a pale replica of what i’d lost. i knew it all along, i sensed it, i felt it. maybe i’m still wallowing...but if i am, i’m at least far more OK with it. i have definitely made my peace with the first, regardless of what has happened with the replacement. maybe i will spend forever looking for as close as a replacement as i can find, so be it. this last one wasn’t close enough to HER in any case. 

i am getting over the surrogate. ‘do a little better everyday’, that’s what rachel told me; and ‘you gotta do the work’. i have a calendar reminder set for the latter, everyday i remember “YOU GOTTA DO THE WORK”. i have been doing a little better everyday, and the days have begun to shorten, have begun to lighten.