Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

“I’m thinking: Well, that was free.”
It was a joke. (I guess?) Maybe he thought the sex was lousy, and he was joking that at least he
didn’t pay for it. Or the sex wasn’t lousy, but he was joking about what a horrible, self-sabotaging
thing that would be to say. Honestly, I didn’t understand the joke, so I won’t parse it on his behalf,
because what I discovered over the next week was that the psychology major had some major
psychology issues. He was twisted up like a tornado inside. (Also, he was a dick.) A few days after
this incident, we had a conversation in which he displayed such casual cruelty I walked away
knowing—possibly for the first time in my life—that it was nothing I did. Some people are so brimful
with misery they can’t help splashing everyone else.
So there it was, my big chance to get sex right again, and I went and screwed an asshole. Maybe I
should have felt crestfallen, but I didn’t. I chalked it up to a learning curve. It was fine. I never saw
him again, and no one was worse for the experience. Actually, I was glad for the experience, because
it taught me that good sex wasn’t a function of sobriety, any more than good sex was a function of
being drunk. Good sex was about the person you were with and, maybe more important, the person
you could be while you were with them.
I STARTED SEEING a musician. He was gone too much of the time, and it was never going to work, but I
wanted to try. When we sat together, he made me feel light-headed. When he looked at me, I had the
giddy feeling of a three-beer buzz.
“You have these drunken, dreamy eyes right now,” he told me, and I could feel it, too. Bliss. Until
I got sober, I never understood the phrase “weak in the knees.” I thought it was an old-timey cliché
that women like my mother used. Then my knees spaghettied underneath me as he walked toward me
once, and I realized: Oh my God, this actually happens.
The first time he and I had sex, I barely remembered it. The whole afternoon was white light and
the dance of tree shadows through the windows. He kissed me on the couch, and then he kissed me on
the stairs, and then I took him to my bed. And then time stopped.
In the years that followed, I would have more sex like this. Sex that felt good and right. And I
noticed when I was with a person I felt comfortable with, I could walk across the room without
smothering myself in a blanket. I could let myself be seen. And I noticed when I stopped worrying so
much about how I looked, I could lose myself more in how I felt.
I always thought good sex without alcohol would be sharp with detail, saturated with color, but
instead it was more like a 4 pm sun flare. Pleasure shuts down the recorder in the brain. The flood of
serotonin and dopamine creates a white-hot burst of ecstasy. For decades, I drank myself to reach that
place of oblivion. Why hadn’t I known? The oblivion could come to me.
ONE AFTERNOON, JENNIFER showed up at my front gate, holding a Fuji cassette that was dated in her
small, careful script: August 23, 1988.
“I can’t believe you still have this,” I told her.
She smiled. “It’s yours now.”
I knew what was on the tape. It was a story I didn’t like. One that explained a lot about my mixedup
history with drinking, men, and sex. I recorded it two days shy of my fourteenth birthday, when I