Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

wheels started coming off. Her blackouts became so frequent that when she was drinking, she would
only communicate via text, so she could have an evidence trail of her decisions.
She and I had always been control freaks. Yet we both drank to the point of losing control. It
sounds contradictory, but it makes total sense. The demands of perfectionism are exhausting, and it’s
hard to live with a tyrant. Especially the one in your own mind.
So she quit drinking, and we found ourselves, once again, two lonely members of an outsider
tribe. We began taking long walks around the lake, sharing all the stories we had not told in the years
of superficial catch-up. We stayed up talking at her house, and some nights it was like we were 13
years old again, laughing so hard we almost peed, except instead of her mom telling us to keep it
down we were interrupted by her daughter, dragging a fuzzy blanket. “I can’t sleep,” she would say,
finger in mouth, and she would hop up into her mother’s lap, one last stint in the world’s safest place.
Talking was the glue of our world, never drinking. We were good talkers. Our conversations were
so natural, so obvious. She would talk, and then I would talk, and then somehow, through this simple
back-and-forth, we could start to hear the sound of our own voices.