In Mayberry they’d blame the drunk and maybe the no shirt, no shoes, dirty overall-wearing bootlegger too.  In sepia tone, they are not wrong.  But in color—and I mean the most vivid colors: blood red, bourbon copper, bruised-knuckle plum, canned bean green, indigo police lights and onyx blackout—those hues don’t go into a mixer and come out gray.  It would be impossible for the majority of the Mayberry township, but our minds are going to have to accommodate a little more than that. 

The desire to view a situation in black and white is part of the human desire for closure.  I get it. If we can catalogue who is right and who is wrong, we can slap shut a file folder and move on. …right?  Once blame is cast and cemented, a wife can go on food stamps and get a restraining order granted, a husband can contemplate if it’s more practical to put a gun in his mouth or chug along to send the insufficient child support checks.  If you aren’t already convinced that no one is winning in this scenario, then remember that their children are coming to me for help with arithmetic.  Everybody here is screwed.

I use a lot of words. I read a lot, I write a lot, I greatly esteem varied vocabulary, articulate messages, poignant poetry, and complex feelings being simplified into pithy, resonating sentences. I’ve also found that in the moments of highest emotions and greatest pain, words will not do. There are no words for the profound feeling of wanting to apologize to someone you hurt with such vigor that you would put your life up as collateral to prove the sincerity of your atonement. There are also no words to describe muzzling that apology because… Goddamn… they hurt you so bad right back.

The dim beast doesn’t offer me a drink.  He doesn’t mention alcohol at all- he never did.  He was there when I was 8-years-old and he’s there now.  He exists when booze is part of my life and he exists when it isn’t.  All he ever does is startle me and then remind me to be scared.  Of everything.  I don’t know why I find him so believable but I do.  You wonder why I spent years drinking so much and so often when everyone begged me not to?  He’s why.  Alcohol, so far, was the only thing that made him disappear.  I have no credibility when I try to explain my plight because, as I said, this demon: invisible as oxygen.  To everyone else. 

There are times when I feel strong.  I can walk right by that foggy fucker, raise a middle finger, and strut on with my day.  There are also times when he wins.  I attempt to ignore him, but that husky and commanding voice calls out to me and forcefully whispers, “psst! Kara… remember, you live alone again.  You know where your mind can go.  You know how dark it can be.  There’s no one and nothing around to save you from yourself but a disabled cat and the sitcom reruns you keep playing to try and force a better mood.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just stop fighting…? Again?” 

I swallowed that platitude like a pill every single day as I watched the things I love disappear over the horizon, one by one. I told myself that I could not move forward if I kept gripping the bumper of a life that was flooring-it to get away from me. I soothed my hurt with the knowledge that the people and the things that I had cherished deserved a more plentiful and better life than I could give them. It was my duty and privilege to send them off to their Eden—far, far away from me. I didn’t want to be one of those people who didn’t know when to surrender. So, I began to surrender quickly and efficiently.

Maybe it’s all my fault for losing my battle with alcohol.  Maybe it’s all my fault for making sobriety look easy and appealing.  When I’m dolled-up with curls in my hair and lipstick on my pout in a dress that is a size 2, it can appear as if I am winning and well.  I’m not.  I’m a turtle in the mud and a snake in the mulch.  Its not a matter of trying harder or doing things differently.  I am quite confident that I do all I can with what I have at the moment, which is something to be proud of, sure.  But when someone asks me, “are you alright?”, I don’t understand their question.  Am I alright sipping my tonic water with a squeeze of lime?  Absolutely.  Am I alright enough to not get drunk and ruin your life again?  Absolutely.  Then I will borrow my sister’s army pants and leave the conversation right there- where people want to keep it. 

There is so much hurt… gnawing at me, gnawing at my family, gnawing at my friends, gnawing still at the people who thought that getting away from me would eradicate it. So much hurt that I know it cannot just be me, my people, my addiction, my situation. It must be universal. I am the alcoholic auspex, but my addiction effected and embittered everyone around me. The kind of hurt I am describing is the kind that turns a heart stone-cold. It emboldens mouths and spackles over ears. It reinforces walls and bricks-up doorways. It commits mass genocide on affections. It maims my heart every time that I sit down to write, but I don’t have a choice. Even if I am yelping into the abyss, a conversation has to happen. A conversation would have saved so many people so much unnecessary suffering.

I miss walking into a bar on a Friday evening, still in heels and panty hose from work, and putting my lips to a frosted glass with the same instinct that an overboard sailor uses to reach for a lifesaver. I miss sipping a pinot noir while I prepare a delicious, but complicated meal for my family. I miss going out for lunch, having one fun cocktail, then deciding as a group to “be bad” and have a second, then lunch turns into an all-day brewery/bar hop. I miss standing knee deep in the ocean, sipping on continuous Corona Lights with my girlfriends and letting the alcohol pull more and more secrets out of us (usually about the boys we brought along, playing frisbee up on the beach.) I miss getting three drinks deep and getting the courage to send a risky text. I miss the way being tipsy made me feel about myself. I miss vacation piña coladas, $15 concert beers, movie theater mini wine bottles, secret wedding flasks, secret funeral flasks, secret obligatory-family-party flasks. I miss the loss of inhibition. I miss the way something boring could be made fun with one little liquid adjustment to my attitude. I miss sipping away my self-consciousness.

What I learned from this situation were the day-to-day frustrations of interacting with an addict. I learned how disappointing it is to be in the middle of a conversation when the person starts misspelling words, repeating themselves, and making zero sense. I learned very quickly that wise words given at night will not be remembered in the morning. Make all the logical, intelligent points that you want, they fall on deaf ears. And the lies—OMG the fucking lies! Lie, after lie, after lie, after lie… LIES. “I wasn’t drunk last night,” “no, I’m not drinking now,” “I remember what I said last night,” “I swear, I’m trying,” “I wouldn’t lie to you.” I know addicts are liars and I know that I lied constantly, but it hits differently when you, yourself, are a former bullshitting drunk. I knew that the lies would happen, I didn’t know they would be constant and that they would burrow like chiggers underneath my skin.

The fear of change is what I believe to be the largest contributing factor to continuing addiction.  Even when things are terrible, even when we know we are killing ourselves, even when we have reached and/or surpassed our breaking point, we don’t want to leave our addiction nest.  It’s so warm, and so cozy.  Its familiar and pacifying and friendly.  Addiction is like a home that can’t be broken and a family that can’t be angered.  So, why would we ever want to leave it once we’re in it?

I don’t write or speak much on my current life at its standard because I think its arrogant. Arrogance is an adjective I would prefer to avoid. Its also careless to brag, given the path of destruction that I left in the preceding three years. However, if I am going to talk about suicidal thoughts, divorce, depression, addiction, sexual assault, heartbreak, panic attacks, and other horrifying things from the recent past, I had better do it in a manner than inspires hope. Despite all that it entails, my story is pretty damn close to a fairytale. People who are struggling should know this. I was a victim. Then I was an alcoholic. Now, my life is wonderful.