Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

But after two beers, I didn’t like our arrangement anymore. And I shot him a look like “If you take
this fourth drink out of my hands, I will cut you.”
I woke up to his back a lot of mornings. I started hanging out more with the guys from work. They
still laughed when I knocked over my martini.
If I had to guess the moment Lindsay knew we were in trouble, I would point to the night I was so
wasted I couldn’t climb our back staircase, so he convinced me I was a kitty cat. I was in a blackout,
and I crawled up the rickety steps on my hands and knees, meowing at the moon and trying to swish
my nonexistent tail. But to Lindsay, this behavior was no longer cute, or funny, or endearing. It was
pathetic.
I went to an alcohol therapist, my big display of I-mean-it-this-time. She had an office in the
Dallas suburbs, in a home with too many cuckoo clocks.
“Men leave women who drink too much,” she told me, as I tugged at the fraying ends on her couch.
“He will leave you.” I thought: How is that fair? Women stay with men who drink too much all the
time. I thought: But if I stop drinking, what would we do together? I thought: What the fuck does this
woman know?
A few months later, Lindsay turned to me after dinner in a shitty Greek restaurant, and he said, “I
can’t do this anymore.” And I knew he did not mean the dinner in the shitty Greek restaurant.
I wasn’t devastated; I was furious. In our time together, his stock only climbed. He was betterlooking,
dressed less like a business nerd and more like the East Dallas musicians I had introduced
him to. Meanwhile, I felt like the fat drunk he was ditching on the side of the road. But underneath my
wounded pride, I knew our split was right. I’d spent two and a half years unsure of my love for him
and hating myself more and more. What I had required was unfair. I wanted him to love me enough for
both of us.
I needed to change. I needed to turn my life into something I didn’t need to drink to tolerate. The
day after Lindsay broke up with me, I made a decision.
“I’m taking your cat,” I told him, “and I’m moving to New York.”