I Stopped Drinking and Started Noticing
Sunsets, birdsong, my own sentences, sobriety returned my attention.
The last drink I ever had was a warm chardonnay in a plastic cup at my niece's eighth birthday party, and I only know that because of the video.
In it, I am explaining something to a bounce house... Not to a person near the bounce house. To the bounce house.
Nobody staged an intervention. My rock bottom did not involve police lights or a totaled car or any of the cinematic furniture we are trained to expect.
It involved my sister texting me the video the next morning with no caption, and me watching it four times at my kitchen table, and noticing, with the strange calm of a scientist, that I could not remember a single minute of a party I had attended for three hours.
Three hours of my one life, gone... and I hadn't even been having a bad time. That was the part that scared me.
Drinking wasn't ruining my life. It was quietly deleting it.
I stopped that day, which sounds decisive and brave and was actually just stubbornness wearing a costume. I did not know yet that quitting the wine would be the easy part. The hard part would be meeting the person who had been sitting behind it.
Nobody warns you about the boredom. The first three weeks of life after alcohol are, and I say this with love, spectacularly boring. Wine had been my punctuation: the cork at 6 p.m. was a period at the end of the workday, the second glass a comma before dinner, the third an ellipsis trailing into television. Without it, evenings became these enormous unstructured prairies of time.
I cleaned the grout. I alphabetized things that had no business being alphabetized. I sat on the roof deck of my building, seven floors above the traffic, because it was the one place that didn't remind me of a drink, and I stared at the city like a woman waiting for a bus that wasn't coming.
And then, somewhere around week five, the strangest thing started happening...
The sunsets got good.
I know how that sounds. The sunsets had presumably been good the whole time. But I had been watching them through a glass of pinot and a light fog, and now, sitting on that roof with a seltzer going warm in my hand, I watched the sky over the west side do something with orange and gray that made me actually gasp, alone, like an idiot, and I realized I was experiencing the sunset in real time, at full resolution, and that it cost nothing, and that I would remember it tomorrow.
That was the trade nobody had explained to me.
I thought sobriety was subtraction. It was actually a refund.
Drinking never ruined my life. It just kept deleting the footage, and sobriety walked in and handed me back the tapes.
My attention came back the way feeling comes back into a numb leg: slowly, then with pins and needles, then completely. I heard birdsong on my morning walk and realized I could not remember the last time I had heard it, though the birds, presumably, had not been on strike. I tasted food again, really tasted it, and became briefly insufferable about tomatoes. I sat through an entire uncomfortable conversation with my mother without an exit strategy, present for every second of it, and it was awful, and I was there for it, and being there for it turned out to matter.
The pins and needles had a dark side too, and I want to be honest about that. All those years, the wine had not just been blurring sunsets. It had been blurring the 2 a.m. inventory, the grief I had been keeping in a box since my father died, the recognition of how many friendships I had let become texting only. Sobriety returned my attention, and my attention, once returned, looked at everything.
Including the stuff I had been specifically drinking at.
So I did the thing I used to do at nineteen, before wine became my editor. I started writing it down.
Badly, at first. God, so badly. But at eleven months sober I wrote a poem about my father's hands, the way he held a coffee cup like it might escape, and when I finished it I was shaking, and I understood that I had been circling that poem for six years with a glass in my hand.
I read an essay around that time, on a writing blog, about why safe poems lose, why the page can smell it when you flinch.
My drinking had been one long flinch.
The poem about the hands did not flinch, because I no longer had the equipment for flinching. It was the first true thing I had made in a decade.
On the one-year mark, instead of a chip or a cake, I entered that poem into a monthly poetry contest, which for me was a more radical act than quitting had been. Quitting was private. This was a stranger reading my sentences with the lights on.
It did not win... I did not care, or rather, I cared for one afternoon and then noticed, with those newly returned senses, that I had done the brave thing and survived it, and that the poem existed either way.
People ask me what I miss. They always ask it a little hungrily, the way you ask someone who moved away whether the new city is really all that. I miss the ritual, sometimes... The cork, the pour, the first cold sip on a July evening. I do not miss anything that came after the second glass, because I cannot miss what I never actually experienced.
What I have instead is harder to put on a postcard. I have Tuesday evenings at full resolution. I have the specific pleasure of driving home from a party at midnight, radio up, completely clear, the whole highway to myself. I have my sister's trust back, which she never said she had lost and never said she returned, but I can hear it in how she hands me things now, including, last month, her car keys and her kids for a weekend.
And I have the roof. I still go up there most clear evenings, seltzer in hand, and watch the city light itself up. Two years in, it still is not boring. That prairie of unstructured time turned out to have things living in it. Everything I write now gets drafted up there, in the hour when the sky goes orange and the pigeons commute home, and if that sounds romantic, good, it is, and I get to keep all of it. Every poem I have written since belongs to the same shelf, the one for new beginnings, though I have stopped thinking of sobriety as a beginning exactly.
It is more like this: for fifteen years, someone else was watching my life, and she took terrible notes.
Now I watch it myself. I take excellent notes.
The sunset is at 8:41 tonight, and I will be there, and tomorrow I will remember it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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