Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
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SEX My first date in sobriety was with a guy I knew from college. When I saw him at the restaurant, he was more attractive than I remembered, though he was wearing jeans that either marked him as above fashion or distressingly behind it. “I don’t mind if you drink,” I lied to him. “I know,” he said, and ordered a Coke. I was getting to the place where I needed to date. (Not want, mind you, but need.) In the cocoon of my crooked little carriage house, I watched documentaries back to back and unspooled fantasy lives with men I’d never met. The tattooed waiter who read Michael Chabon. The handyman with Paul Newman eyes. I could see myself losing years this way, living nowhere but between my ears. So I forced myself out the front door with trembling hands and burgundy lip gloss. All dating is an unknown country, but as far as I knew, mine was uninhabitable. Even friends who didn’t struggle with raging booze problems were unclear how I was going to date without alcohol. “I don’t think I’ve ever kissed a guy for the first time without drinking,” said my 27-year-old coworker Tracy. And she was a professional sex writer. How did this happen? We were worldly twenty-first-century women, who listened to sex podcasts and shared tips on vibrators and knew all the naughty peepholes of the Internet. And yet somehow we acquired all this advanced knowledge of sex—threesomes, BDSM, anal—and zero mastery over its most basic building block. The idea of kissing unmoored me. Touching a man’s lips to mine without the numbing agent of a three-beer buzz sounded like picking up a downed wire and placing it in my mouth. After dinner, my old college friend took me to a coffee shop, where I drank hot chocolate on a breezy patio. I liked him. (Mostly.) He was a doctor. He remembered the oddest details about me from college, which was flattering, like he’d been thinking about me all along. I told him a poignant story about my past, because I sensed this was the scooching-closer portion of the evening, and he took my hand, which was resting on the table. Such a simple gesture: four fingers slipped into the crook of my own. But with that subtle and natural movement, my arm became encased in a block of ice. Oh God, the panic. I was afraid to pull away. I was afraid to invite him closer. I was like a doe who had spied the red laser sighting of a gun on my chest. Do not move. They say drinking arrests your emotional development at the age when you start using it to bypass discomfort, and nothing reminded me of that like sex. In the year and a half since I’d quit, I had confronted so many early and unformed parts of myself, but sex continued to make me downright squeamish. I was horrified by the vulnerability it entailed. Sometimes I walked around in disbelief about blow jobs. Not that I’d given them, but that anyone had, ever. As I sat on the patio with my frozen robot arm, I kept flashing to an alternate version of this date. The one where I poured rocket fuel down my throat and went barreling toward him with a parted mouth. Instead, when he dropped me off, I darted from his front seat so fast I practically left a cloud of dust. Thankyounicetoseeyougoodnight. I climbed into my bed and pulled the duvet up to my chin,
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- Page 65 and 66: “This was fun,” I said. He was
- Page 67 and 68: OF COURSE. OF course I’d gone to
- Page 69 and 70: like you should not be crying,” h
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- Page 73 and 74: When the bottle was drained, I’d
- Page 75 and 76: But no, really, I had it this time.
- Page 77 and 78: off a gargantuan diamond. I thought
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- 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
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- 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: He tugged too hard, then I tugged t
- 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 and 130: THIS IS THE PLACE A few months befo
- Page 131 and 132: Anna and I have had 20 years of the
- 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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