Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

window with a guy in a white dinner jacket and clunky black glasses. The last thing I remember
seeing is his face, his mouth open in mid-laugh. And behind him, night.
I woke up in my bed the next morning. I didn’t know how the reception ended or how I got home.
Bubba was beside me, purring. Nothing alarming, nothing amiss. Just another chunk of my life,
scooped out as if by a melon baller.
People who refuse to quit drinking often point to the status markers they still have. They make lists
of things they have not screwed up yet: I still had my apartment. I still had my job. I had not lost my
boyfriend, or my children (because I didn’t have any to lose).
I took a bath that night, and I lay in the water for a long time, and I dripped rivers down my thighs
and my pale white belly, and it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps no real consequences
would ever come to me. I would not end up in a hospital. I would not wind up in jail. Perhaps no one
and nothing would ever stop me. Instead, I would carry on like this, a hopeless little lush in a space
getting smaller each year. I had held on to many things. But not myself.
I don’t know how to describe the blueness that overtook me. It was not a wish for suicide. It was
an airless sensation that I was already dead. The lifeblood had drained out of me.
I rose out of the bathtub, and I called my mother. A mother was a good call to make before
abandoning hope. And I said to her the words I had said a thousand times—to friends, and to myself,
and to the silent night sky.
“I think I’m going to have to quit drinking,” I told her.
And this time, I did.