Green is waves in colour

 

Rain  drenching the garden and fields. Green wavers and stirs and shifts and billows. The world is green and watery.

A wet weekend. My neighbour brings back a borrowed white umbrella, semi-furled, and shows me an old black-and-white photograph he bought of  Debbie Reynolds in her prime. How sweet. Framed in imbuia teak and slightly yellowing. Her milk teeth look like ivory tuskers, but I don’t say so. A touch of jaundice, but I don’t say so.

From a letter to a friend talking about what remains unsaid concerning relapses and putting aside the moralising discourses:

Many of us prefer to minimise or gloss over slips or relapses in others because they are just more of the same. Stopping and starting, that senseless continuum. And looking back at my own falls from grace before I finally sobered up,  frequently I was just waiting for an excuse or opportunity to drink again. We sober up, we feel well, our lives look brighter — what better time to have a little drink? So a relapse is rarely a learning experience. It is not inevitable. It is not loaded with insights. It may be just an aberration, or part of a pattern. Often there is no insight, nothing to be learned.

But sometimes we do not want to drink, we consciously want to stay sober. And  in what feels like mindless sabotage we find ourselves drinking. Or something devastating happens against which we feel we have no recourse or powers of resistance,  a bereavement,  a blow,  a betrayal; and we need the comfort of drinking. Or an unseen and indefinable pressure builds up and we drink when we feel we are about to explode. Could certain relapses have been prevented by a confrontation or intervention or last-minute realization?

The ‘why’ of a serious unpremeditated relapse may only be evident in hindsight. I have heard friends talk about looking back and detecting the unseen enemy within, the part/self within that really wanted to drink again and how situations were manipulated so that the divided self would have no choice but to drink. Or how a mood of indifference came over them when offered a drink. Why not drink? Or how they kept feeling defiant about all kinds of small things that eventually came to include having a few harmless drinks.

But often when people talk about a relapse, they talk about enduring intense anxiety or a painful mood they knew was happening but did not think to mention. The meds were changed and they went through  inner turmoil. Depression began creeping up on them and they didn’t want to talk about it. Or someone said  something hurtful and they began brooding, but didn’t deal with those feelings of hurt and wounded anger. They were turned down for a job and could not talk about it. They agreed to keep a secret for a family member that gnawed at them. They were frightened by an news article on ageing or cancer. They had a health crisis and said nothing.  Feeings of anger and frustration kept recurring for a week or so.  They said nothing to anyone. The unspoken aspects of a relapse are scary.

They went downstairs and noticed wine bottles in the basement. They found a bottle of Scotch hidden in the laundry. They accepted an invitation to a cocktail function. And did not speak about this to anyone for several days. They forgot about it until that very moment when they were home alone or feeling awkward and uncomfortable with alcohol within easy reach.

 

And when we talk to the mortfied relapsee afterwards, he or she says: ‘But I didn’t think it was important.‘

Is there a deep distrust of others at work? A desire to outwit the helpful supportive friends and family?

This too:  that occasionally the pattern of relapse seems obvious to everyone but the relapsee. They will not  or cannot see that they need to avoid certain events or places or activities.

You cannot stop smoking, lose weight and not drink all at once. Simple as that.

You cannot go on holiday with a heavy drinking ex-lover and escape unscathed.

You cannot sit in pubs night after night nursing soda while others laugh and joke and fall about.

It is plain that certain family dynamics inevitably end in a relapse. We watch this happen over and over again — in my case I have seen a friend relapse  over the same situation eight times in 18 months — and the resistance  and denial continues. Is my perception flawed or does she in fact need the re-enactment in order to drink? Is the forgetting akin to a Freudian slip?

 

No easy answers. Let me go and paint blue cerulean skies and another bold African grey parrot onto my beige canvas.

 

Because even with grey and darkening skies I remember the blue of blue skies and know that blue is lurking just behind the clouds. That if we hold on the blue skies and sunshine will be there in the morning. Because I cannot stop you from drinking again but I believe in those blue cerulean skies, limitless and open.