I always like the pink cloud days of the beginning of another promise of sobriety I make to myself. I literally feel my body start animating itself again, my brain spinning a little slower when I get on the subway with every day that I'm clean, the feeling of a head full of salt water sloshing around draining out with ever extra hour of sober sleep. Once I start navigating myself around the city on overdue errands like a normal member of society around the one-week mark, I start to feel those unfamiliar washes. Pangs. Small stubs of a psychic toe. Weird sensations of giving a shit. Hanging up a phone call and not knowing that I miss somebody but feeling like I miss somebody. For most people it's very trivial and expected to feel as though you care about someone else, but when you're a real drinker your lines between an authentic, slowed down, deliberate feeling and a juiced-up, hyperbolic one that only comes out when soaked with a lot of whiskey is non-existent. Things get strangely cerebral on the bottle, believe it or not. In your complete irrational way of living the way you relate becomes very black and white. I am here, I am with these people, he's an asshole, she's my friend. I want that person. I don't feel like I want that person, but I know that I do. I know that I want that person around, but I don't feel it. Science explains this, how habitual drinking leads to a complete restructuring of chemicals in the brain--your neurons blossoming extra receptors to compensate for the avalanches of dopamine you send to your brain every night. Then when the booze isn't fueling the deluge, the receptors sit there in your brain, hungry and wilty, your mood static and hollow. Unless you're drinking, you don't have a single emotion register on the richter scale. A literal, real alcohol fueled robot. Then you decide, half with whatever rational thought you have left against the pure and direct requests from your private chemistry--satiate now, or wait it out.

Let's say you choose the latter. Then the pink cloud, the aligning, the sobriety you are so proud of--you want to laminate it, frame it, coddle it. Amazing how you can suddenly be so willing and able to smash it in the laziest of ways. How you can be so drunk in your sobriety on real emotions, you just cannot imagine how you ever lived any other way. And then you feel threatened. You feel bored. You start hanging out with your drunk friends, and they ask where the fun version of you went. You realize you have nothing in common with the people you spend the majority of your time with and feel resentment towards them. You start worrying that they're feeling resentment towards you too--didn't you realize? You had a function, and it was not to have meaningful conversations about politics or god or your soggy emotions towards an old lover or fuck knows what else it is you're blathering on about so awkwardly. You were fun, easy to be with, down for whatever. You always made the night a little edgier, a little more haphazard, a little more F.T.W. Who's the traitor here? Who's at fault? They never mislead you, never suggested that you call them in the afternoon to catch up. You're the one who changed, you can't complain.


I swan dived his weekend, and I'm trying to really understand why. I remember a really uncomfortable realization that the person I was looking at had played a significant role in my life and that I missed them. They were sitting right next to me, and I was sober, and I missed them. I remember touching my hair too much and making a couple inappropriate jokes that nobody laughed at. I remember thinking one beer. I remember thinking in between gulps about a story I read about a man who was sober for 3.5 years and decided to conduct an experiment with a bottle of scotch. He sat alone in his old drinking chair and took a shot. Nothing bad happened, he took another. 4 hours later the bottle was empty and the man stood up, and to no one in paritcular said, "The Experiment has failed." I remember sitting on the john 4 drinks later with my head falling down by knees and saying "OK THAT'S IT." I remember looking at this person and feeling immense jealousy for the way they were looking out the window. I remember the bartender making me a shot, he winked at me, it was in a highball glass and tasted minty. He touched my arm and I remember thinking it's too late now and how liberating it was to just be bad again, like I was finally being honest with myself because isn't this what I do? What else am I known for? It's not their fault, this is how I've always behaved. I provided a sketch of myself to others. I can't get angry when they don't choose the right colors to shade in between the lines--whatever macabre and specific colors I had imagined myself consisting of without any sort of proof.

I remember sitting on my floor, passing a bottle of Jack in between us because I just wasn't there yet. I was still touching my hair too much. I hadn't departed psychically, to my planet bullshit, my debut on a film reel of a more authentic, feeling person. I faked the feeling, I knew it was fake, I tucked myself into the falsity and hit my marks, knowing it was fake but high on my peptide wave of feeling this right now I wouldn't have been able to offer much clarity on it in those moments. I remember waking up and feeling like the left side of my brain was engaging in open-fire with the right side. I remember feeling like at any moment I would lose motor control and vomit everywhere, over every living thing in the world, over all of my possessions and it would just keep shooting from my gut until the organs themselves lept out from my mouth--a stomach hitting the back wall, a heart against the window. I remember thinking this person looked really great in the shirt they were wearing, and that I wanted to touch the sleeve but I couldn't because I was too busy keeping my body from erupting. So I went back to sleep, feeling retarded. You know, really retarded.

Today isn't a landmark. I'm trying to keep tabs. I finally returned somebody's phone call who had been trying to reach me for weeks, really upset that I was leaving. I remember not understanding why they kept saying they would miss me, how they were able to be so honest. Then at some point during our conversation I realized that we had dated for like, 3 months. I had been so fucked in the head, so separated from the reality of my actions that I literally didn't know this fact until this conversation. It was shocking. I was sober, sitting by city hall, realizing that I had been in a relationship without my knowing. There were no tricks, no shenanigans, we went out a bunch of times but drank out even more. But they weren't the only one, I knew I cared about them but I didn't feel it. I was sober. I was sitting by city hall with my visa documents in my lap, realizing that I had really fucked up. Say it with me now....I always knew I was fucking up but I never felt like I was fucking up. If anybody has every wondered how I have had such a natural talent for treating other people like shit, this is why. If you don't feel it--the flush, the intrinsic knowing instead of the theoretically knowing, than you can't possibly give a fuck.

I remember apologizing, hanging up and for once in the past two months not feeling as though I was on the precipice of a humiliating, crippling panic attack, that I was lucky to have someone who was able to forgive me, that I have so many people who have forgiven me so many fucking times and truly cared about me despite me not really existing like a normal human being, of being reckless and quite often cruel and always messy. I went home and wrote an honest letter. I felt like I would miss this person, like I would miss a lot of people.

I signed my full name, the one I was born with.