Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

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this side. For so many years, I was stuck in a spin cycle of worry and questioning. Am I an alcoholic? Is alcoholism a “disease”? What if this, or that, or the other thing? Overthinkers are the most exhausting alcoholics. I have left a trail of soggy Kleenex that could stretch to the sun, but the equation is simple. When I cut out alcohol, my life got better. When I cut out alcohol, my spirit came back. An evolved life requires balance. Sometimes you have to cut out one thing to find balance everywhere else. I watch women at bars sometimes. I watch them holding the wineglass in their hands, the wet curve of the lip forever finding the light. I watch them in their skirts small as cocktail napkins and their skyscraper heels, but I don’t envy them anymore. Maybe at some advanced age, we get the gift of being happy where we are. Or maybe where I am right now got a whole lot easier to take. A woman I know told me a story once, about how she’d always been the girl in the front row at live shows. Pushing her way to the place where the spotlight burned tracers in her eyes and the speakers rattled her insides. When she quit drinking, she missed that full-throttle part of herself, but then she realized: Sobriety is full throttle. No earplugs. No safe distance. Everything at its highest volume. All the complications of the world, vibrating your sternum. I go to meetings, and I can’t believe the grief people walk through. Losing their children, losing their spouse. I can’t believe how sheltered I’ve been. Here I am, undone by the loss of my 17-yearold cat. “I wish I was tougher,” I complained to my friend Mary. “Well, you’re not tough,” she told me, and I laughed. “Tough is a posture anyway. You’re something better. You’re resilient.” I still cry most mornings when I awake and he’s not there. I hate looking up in the second-story window where he will never sit, breaking into excited noise when I come through the gate. But I know how to start over now, which means I can start over as many times as I need. I’m all too aware that the biggest challenges of my life are still in front of me. And I feel a little worried about that. Mostly, I feel prepared. It’s funny how I used to think drinking made me a grown-up. Back when I was a little girl, I would slip a crystal wineglass off the shelf of my parents’ cabinet, and the heft of it felt like independence. I played cocktail party, not tea party, because that’s what glamorous adults on TV did. But drinking was actually an extended adolescence for me. An insanely fun, wonderfully complicated, emotionally arrested adolescence. And quitting drinking was the first true act of my adulthood. A coming-of-age for a woman who came of age a long time ago. EACH YEAR, I drive out to see Anna. It takes ten hours to get to her West Texas home from Dallas, but I don’t mind. The rumble of the tires is like a meditative hum. The perpetual motion shuts down my brain. The sky is a blue that contains many blues: the milky blue of the prairie, the electric blue of the desert. I listen to pop songs in the car, three-minute blasts of feel-good, a buzz that never fails. My Honda is like a portable ’70s disco: ELO, the BeeGees, Queen. As I drive across the empty roads, I sing with the surrender that booze used to bring, and I wonder if it would ever be possible to take this starlit feeling and somehow stretch it across the rest of my life.
Anna and I have had 20 years of these reunions. Twenty years of hugs and how-was-the-drives, and both of us politely disagreeing over who is going to carry the bags to the doorstep. And whenever Anna and I feel far apart, even as we are sitting next to each other on the couch, I tell myself 20 years was a good run. The distance of these past years has spooked me. A couple years ago, I came out to visit, and we had a tense disagreement in her car. It was nighttime, and we were stopped at the railroad that cuts through town, the red light flashing as the boxcars hurtled past. I said to her, with too much grit in my voice, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be single and alone.” And she said, with perfect calm, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be married with a kid.” It was the full summary of the standoff we’d been having for years. The white arm of the gate lifted, and we crossed the tracks. This time, I want it to be different. I know that her life has changed, but I want to believe that I might still have a place in it. I turn into the gravel road that leads to her place. I pull up to find Anna doing her jokey dance, guiding me into the driveway. Alice stands behind the screen door, watching. It’s hard to imagine a world farther from New York. There’s a clothesline on her patio, an ocotillo cactus growing in her front yard. “You made it,” she says, and I smile. “I did.” The next afternoon, we drive through the red-rock mountains heading to a natural spring. The vista makes you wonder why anyone ever moved to a city. I keep feeling the urge for some monumental conversation, but Anna and I have had two decades of monumental conversations. Maybe what we need are smaller conversations now. So we talk about the latest New Yorker. We talk about films. We talk about the view outside the window, a view we share for a change. Best friends. For so long, those two words contained music to me, but also a threat of possession. I hung the words like pelts in my room. I had best friends for every life phase, every season. The words were meant to express love, but wasn’t I also expressing competition? There was a ranking, and I needed to be at the top. Anna’s closest friend now is a woman she works with at the legal aid office. They take care of each other’s children and giggle with the familiarity of twins. It’s exactly the kind of companionship Anna and I had once, and it stings sometimes when I feel replaced, but I wouldn’t wish anything different for her. I know Anna and I will never be friends like we were at 19, because we’ll never be 19 again. I also know this is nothing I did. That while drinking wrecks precious things, it never wrecked our friendship. Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides. At the springs, Anna and I lay down a blanket on the grass and splay out our imperfect bodies. I tell her about what I’m writing, and she talks about Alice’s new Montessori preschool. We don’t share the same language anymore, but we are both trying to learn the other’s vocabulary. I wonder if our lives will track closer after I have a baby, and she once again becomes the mentor she was to me in my younger days. Then again, I may never have a baby, and I feel all right with that. So many women my age are torn up over the question mark of motherhood, but on this topic—if nothing else—I feel a total zen. I don’t know what comes next. It’s like a novel whose ending I haven’t read yet. The sun is hot, and pools of sweat start dripping down our bare bellies. We walk out to the spring and touch a toe in the water. It’s bracingly cold. A short diving board leads out into the middle of the
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Begin Reading Table of Contents New
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PRELUDE
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The guy isn’t bad-looking. Slight
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WOMEN WHO DRINK I was 33, and lying
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she did not get—but I’ve never
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In my 20s, friends called with that
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I discussed roofies with Aaron Whit
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a while, a columnist would come alo
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ONE
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when no one was looking, and I woul
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steps, not talking. As much as my f
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Our home was on a major artery thro
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She’d transformed, like Olivia Ne
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I threw up seven times. Hunched ove
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STARVED One of the curious aspects
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more successful her eating disorder
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orrowed. She couldn’t miss the si
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To make it more confounding, Miles
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efused to be won. I drank cup after
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DRESSING IN MEN’S CLOTHES I start
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coffee. But that seemed like a very
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you to imperil our amazing friendsh
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I FINALLY GOT a boyfriend near the
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FOUR
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The production guy passed my desk a
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drank myself to the place where I w
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ehind me, and told him I was moving
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my Harp as soon I walked in the doo
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FIVE
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“Your key, mademoiselle,” said
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My friend Meredith lived in an apar
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“This was fun,” I said. He was
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OF COURSE. OF course I’d gone to
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like you should not be crying,” h
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SIX
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When the bottle was drained, I’d
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But no, really, I had it this time.
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off a gargantuan diamond. I thought
Page 79 and 80: INTERLUDE
Page 81 and 82: ain, which allowed his body to deve
Page 83 and 84: SEVEN
Page 85 and 86: But his once-sallow cheeks were ros
Page 87 and 88: announcing their baby. Nobody wants
Page 89 and 90: want to remain silent and unknowabl
Page 91 and 92: Bubba curled up alongside me when I
Page 93 and 94: EIGHT
Page 95 and 96: for me? My friends didn’t necessa
Page 97 and 98: ecause otherwise you have to go int
Page 99 and 100: said, and she was right. The next w
Page 101 and 102: fill-in-the-blank letter of apology
Page 103 and 104: NINE
Page 105 and 106: the tastes of a frat boy, or a grum
Page 107 and 108: Mine was a recipe for unhappiness.
Page 109 and 110: He tugged too hard, then I tugged t
Page 111 and 112: SEX My first date in sobriety was w
Page 113 and 114: 30s to stare down a personal profil
Page 115 and 116: and said, “Look, I dressed up for
Page 117 and 118: “I’m thinking: Well, that was f
Page 119 and 120: he’s impotent or not, I don’t k
Page 121 and 122: ELEVEN
Page 123 and 124: the scorn of strangers. They skip t
Page 125 and 126: Addiction was the inverse of honest
Page 127 and 128: I worshipped alcohol, and it consum
Page 129: THIS IS THE PLACE A few months befo
Page 133 and 134: saying in midsentence. My dad loses
Page 135 and 136: from here, I told myself. There wil
Page 137 and 138: ABOUT THE AUTHOR SARAH HEPOLA’S w
Page 139: Contents COVER TITLE PAGE WELCOME D
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Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

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