Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

announcing their baby. Nobody wants to walk that shit back.
Our office in Midtown became a demilitarized zone for me. What was I going to do, drink at my
desk? There was nothing festive about that place. In the depth of the recession, we had moved from an
airy loft with brushed-steel fixtures to a bleak cubicle farm with gray carpets and dirty windows. A
tube sock sagged the end of an aluminum slat on the Venetian blinds, a bizarre artifact from the
previous tenants, and we were all so demoralized and overloaded that it was months before anyone
thought to simply reach out and pull the thing down.
The work kept my hyperactive brain buckled in for a spell, though. A friend described her editing
job as being pelted to death by pebbles, and when I think back to that summer, all I see are rocks
flying at my face—contributors whose checks were late, writers growing antsy for edits. I spent half
of the workday combing ridiculous stock pictures to illustrate stories. Woman with head in her
hands. Woman staring out rainy window. Woman tearing out hair. A montage of the personal essays
I was running, and also my life.
Around noon, I’d reach out to my deputy editor Thomas. “Lunch?” I’d type.
He’d type back, “Give me a sec.”
“This is bullshit,” I’d type with mock impatience. “You are so fucking fired right now. FUCKING
FIRED, DO YOU HEAR ME?”
“Ready,” he’d type back.
We’d walk to a chain restaurant in the ground floor of the Empire State Building, where I ate a
burrito as big as a football, and Thomas calmly explained to me why I was not going to quit my job
that day.
Sober folk have a phrase for people who quit drinking and float about with happiness. In the pink
cloud. I was the opposite of that. I was in a black cloud. A storm cloud. Each day brought new misery
into focus. New York: When did it get so unbearable? People: Why do they suck so bad? Sometimes,
when I was riding the subway, I would think about burying a hatchet in a stranger’s skull. Nothing
personal, but: What would it feel like? Would their head sink in like a pumpkin, or would I have to
really yawp and swing the hatchet to get it in?
I was not great company, and so I retreated into my apartment. I turned down dinner parties. I
excused myself from work events. I listened to podcast interviews, the texture of conversation without
the emotional risk. The voices of Terry Gross and Marc Maron filled my apartment so often my
neighbors must have thought they were my best friends. And I guess, during those lonely months, they
were.
I visited my chic, unsmiling hairstylist in Greenpoint to get my hair done. Nothing like an oldfashioned
makeover to turn that grumpy black rain cloud to blue skies. I sat down in her vinyl swivel
chair, across from a giant full-length mirror, and was startled by my own reflection: dumpy and
sweaty, my chunky thighs spread even wider by the seat. I looked so buried. And as she snipped and
measured around my shoulders, all I could think was: I want to rip off my own face.
When she was done, she handed me a mirror to see myself from multiple angles. “It looks
amazing,” I told her. I wanted to die.
No, I did not want to die. I wanted to fast-forward through this dull segment. I want to skip to the
part when I was no longer broken and busted up. Was that day coming? Could we skip this part and
get there soon? I’d spent years losing time, nights gone in a finger snap, but now I found myself with
way too much time. I needed to catapult into a sunnier future, or I needed to slink back to a familiar