Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

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,