Sublime

since the last morning of 2003, the morning after he died, I had been trying to reverse time, run the film backward. It was now eight months later, August 30, 2004, and I still was.

In meetings you often hear people say that, by definition, an addict is someone who seeks physical solutions to emotional or spiritual problems. I suppose that’s an intellectual way of describing that brand of fear, and the instinctive response that accompanies it: there’s a sense of deep need, and the response is a grabbiness, a compulsion to latc

Every day meant two scoops out of the kibble. The bag became an hourglass counting down their final days with Belinda.

A woman I know named Liz calls alcoholism “the disease of more,” a reference to the greediness so many of us tend to feel around liquor, the grabbiness, the sense of impending deprivation and the certainty that we’ll never have enough. More is always better to an alcoholic; more is necessary. Why have two drinks if you can have three? Three if you

AFTER HE LEFT THE HOSPITAL, WILLIAM LIVED THE WAY HE imagined drunks did after they stopped drinking: carefully, and one day at a time.