Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

Bubba curled up alongside me when I saw her name on the phone. My breath hitched as if the call
were from a long-lost boyfriend.
“I’m sorry I haven’t called you before now,” she said. Her voice was soft. She sounded exhausted
and maybe a bit scared. But I heard a tenderness, too, and it assured me the long, cracked desert I’d
just crawled across was a punishment that existed entirely in my mind. “Do you have a minute?”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up. “I have about a thousand.”
It was one of those fragile moments when I didn’t want to move, for fear any sudden commotion
might cause one of us to flutter away. But I also had a desire to escape the pain cave of my apartment
and walk in the open air. As we spoke, I tippy-toed down the creaky stairs and made my way along
the quietest of the tree-lined avenues to the benches along the Hudson, where I could sit and stare at
New Jersey and feel the sun on my shoulders before it slipped behind the horizon once more.
We talked for a long time. She told me how painful and frightening that delivery was. How
glorious and uncertain the first days of motherhood were. So much she didn’t know. She watched
people she barely knew cradle a child she had created but had not yet learned to hold. I didn’t tell her
about the explosion of anguish set off by my dumb text message. I didn’t mention the text message at
all. I tried to be a good friend, and just listen.
But I worried that I was waking up to my own life just in time to watch people slip away. The
word “recovery” suggests you are getting something back. How come the only thing I felt was loss?
I wanted to apologize to Anna. Dealing with myself honestly for the first time was starting to make
me realize what she’d been shouldering all these years. The hours absorbing my catalog of misery,
gluing me together only to watch me bust apart. But how many times can you apologize to one person?
I was also reluctant to make this another conversation about me. She was moving into a new phase of
life—marked by worry, fear, fatigue—and I stood there, mute and blinking, stranded in the mistakes
of my own past.
I wanted the gift of forgetting. Boozy love songs and brokenhearted ballads know the torture of
remembering. If drinking don’t kill me, her memory will, George Jones sang, and I got it. The
blackouts were horrible. It was hideous to let those nights slide into a crack in the ground. But even
scarier was to take responsibility for the mess I’d made. Even scarier was to remember your own
life.
DRINKERS AND FORMER drinkers have this in common: They seek each other out in the night. In the
loneliest hours, I often reached out to writers I knew had quit. Emails intended to look casual, like I
wasn’t asking for help, but what I really wanted to know was: How did you do it? How can I do what
you did?
Strange currents lead us to each other. Back when I was in my late 20s, a guy typed into the search
bar “I fucking drink too much,” and it brought him to a post where I’d written those exact words, and I
was so proud. Through the magic of the Internet, and Google search function, and my WordPress blog
—his little message in a bottle found my shore.
Whenever I wrote my own random emails to other people, I was often awed by the attentiveness
of their responses. These people barely knew me. We live in an age when most of us can’t be
bothered to capitalize emails or spell out the words “are” and “you,” and yet, these letters were often
expansive, full of honesty and care. Maybe it’s easier to be our best selves with strangers. People