Drinking: A Love Story

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

as long as I don’t drink, as long as I expose my doubts and fears to the clear light and refuse to drown them in liquor, I believe I’ll find my way, as a person, as part of a couple.

I struggled to ignore it, the way a woman hears coldness in a lover’s voice and struggles, mightily and knowingly, to misread it.

I can see the rocking now as a first addiction of sorts. It calmed me, took me out of myself, gave me a sense of relief.

Your head feels like it weighs way too much, so much it hurts to move: you feel a throbbing behind one of your eyes, or in your temple. A sharp pain, a steady ache. Your brain hurts, as though the fluid between your brain and skull is thick and inflamed. You feel mildly nauseated and you can’t tell if you need to eat or if eating would make you sic

self-conscious bravado.

I had a fantasy of myself drinking just then, not drinking in the sophisticated, martini-glass sense but in the raging, obliterating sense, drinking to get drunk, drinking in order to yield to that rebellious urge and show everyone in the room just how angry I was, just how out of place I felt, just how self-destructive I could be in response.

unmanageability was the story of my life: I was living in a state of self-imposed chaos, lying and hiding and keeping secrets and feeling trapped, absolutely trapped, in the whole mess.

Alcoholics drink in order to ease the very pain that drinking helps create.