Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

said, and she was right.
The next week, a year to the day I got sober, I moved back to Dallas, the city where Stephanie and
I once sat in a chain restaurant, promising each other we would escape to New York.
I found a crooked little carriage house, with leafy trees all around, where I made French press
coffee, just like Stephanie made when I first visited her in New York. I hung the Japanese robe I first
saw her wear, and I bought aviator sunglasses like the ones she had. And I smiled at all the many
ways she has shown me what I hope to be in this world.
RIGHT BEFORE MOVING, I sent out an “I’m coming back!” email to my friends in Dallas. The premise
was to ask if anyone had housing tips, but the real intent was to drum up enthusiasm about my return. I
waited for the exclamation marks and all-caps emails to fill my in-box. A handful of people
responded. Otherwise, I was greeted by the sound of wind whistling through an empty canyon.
“It’s not like I expected a parade,” I told my mom, which was another way of saying: I was totally
expecting a parade, and this blows.
I worried I had screwed up by choosing to return to Dallas. I always figured I’d wind up in
Austin, weird and wacky Austin, except every time I visited that town I had a nagging suspicion too
many people loved it, and every time I visited Dallas, I had a nagging feeling not enough did.
Dallas had evolved from the place I grew up. More walkable areas and cool coffee shops, fewer
cement slabs and soulless redevelopment. I think some part of me wanted to reckon with my past. I
grew up in Dallas, so embarrassed for the person I was. Maybe I needed to assure that little girl: Hey,
kid, this place isn’t so bad.
I also longed to be close to my family again. My parents had moved out of the ritzy school district
and bought a modest and lovely house near the lake, with my mother’s grand piano in the bay window
and a backyard filled with shade trees and a handsome dog that didn’t obey. A wisteria vine grew
outside the guest bedroom window. My favorite flower, planted where any weary visitor might see it
each morning. My brother had moved back to Dallas after living all over the globe—London, Italy,
Iraq—and he launched a full-scale campaign to get me home. He whipped out his wallet: What will it
take to get you back?
Most of us need to push away from our families at some point, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But there’s also nothing wrong with wanting them close again. Many people choose alternate families
in sobriety. I chose my real one instead.
WHEN I LIVED in Dallas in my late 20s, my ass was hot-glued to a bar stool. The thing I knew best
about my hometown was the drink specials. Now I faced a question that would greet me in any city in
the country: What did people do, anyway?
On Friday nights, I loaded up on craft projects. Needlepoint. A latch-hook rug of a tabby. A crossstitch
of the cast from The Breakfast Club. I was one butter sculpture shy of a state fair submission,
and I didn’t care. My hands needed occupation. I needed to do something—instead of sitting around,
thinking about the one thing I didn’t get.
When you quit drinking, you are sandbagged by the way alcohol is threaded into our social
structure. Drinking is the center of weddings, holidays, birthdays, office parties, funerals, lavish trips