Remembering how it was

I’m gobsmacked,  flabbergasted, blown away, overwhelmed to have received so many kind and  encouraging wishes on my sobriety anniversary. The goodness and warmth of  fellow bloggers is for me the heart of  our sober journey together. Thank you all so very much.

 

A computer technician came around and worked on my ailing appliances. He muttered about effed-up cookies and faulty memory, power surges,  old equipment and  incompatible platforms. I sat meek and techno-dumb, feeling poor as a church mouse and irredeemably clueless. Let us hope something  can be done. The dogs sat around  with bright eyes and quick understanding, nodding and  pricking up their ears. Fortunately he is fond of dogs and  probably also thought that smart young pooches will be able to operate no-touch Internet devices in a year or two, long before floundering humans get there. Ah well.

 

It is colder now and when I get up and  sit down to meditate in the early mornings I can hear horned owls hooting over the rooftops as they return from hunting expeditions. Lovely melancholy sound.

 

Very sad to belatedly hear that a blogger I  knew online but only slightly  died last year. And the same day  I had news than someone who  got sober back in 2007 has also died after a  terrible episode of  binge drinking. Again and  again I have seen how  active alcoholism erodes the will to live. Recovery is precious, something to be guarded and cherished.

 

Recalling again what it felt like. To be out in that wilderness of addiction, the loneliness and paranoia, the  anguish and desire only to die. Waking to despair, the longing only for oblivion. So far from human touch, so far from  connection or redemption, to be walking out alone into the  blizzard, the darkness, the desert, no direction except towards death. Reading Franz Wright again:

 

Entry in an Unknown Hand

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.
By sonic inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this
room. I am not asked to explain my presence
anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and
are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking
certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank——
You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non-
chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested,

but I know them. It’s like this everywhere——

they think they are going to surprise me: I,
who do nothing but wait.

Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up——
very clever.

They think that they can scare me.

I am always scared.

And how much courage it requires to get up in the
morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates
you!

At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and
refuse to go on, it’s not done.

I go on

dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white
laughter and applause,

past a million unlighted windows, peered out at
by the retired and their aged attack-dogs—

toward my place,

the one at the end of the counter,

the scalpel on the napkin.

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