Tag Archives: Recovery

Cat and Mouse

Posted in Alcoholism, Houston, Recovery, Short Story, Uncategorized by

To Lydia, there was an acute anticipation and perplexing excitement wrapped around her alone-time bottle. But first she had to accomplish her chores in order to be able to drink in peace. Normally, the first order of duty, upon coming home from Spec’s, was stashing the bottles so Henry would not stumble upon them.

Lydia replenished the liquor in the bar. Although she tried to stay away from it, she inevitable drank away at least one, if not more, of the bottles before she was able to make it back to Spec’s. A long-standing cat and mouse game existed between Henry and Lydia. Lydia was sure he kept tabs on the level of liquids that were in each of the bottles. Lydia in turn also kept tabs so that she would put in the exact amount back. Lydia didn’t know what would happen if this game didn’t exist, if Henry didn’t try to exert control, and if she didn’t try to outwit him. It was insanity. She was sure of that. She never told any of her friends, never told anyone, of the craziness that played out between her and Henry. She was ashamed of it. And yet, there was a coyness to the situation. She knew he cared. So, while she could not let him cut off her supply of alcohol, she played along and let him think he was making a difference. The idea that Henry and Lydia would ever have an adult, rational conversation about Lydia’s drinking was laughable. Some things, Lydia thought, were better left in the closet.

Lydia walked back into the kitchen and started putting the groceries away. She was an expert chef, had learned over the years. But now that the kids were gone, Henry was mostly at work, Lydia didn’t really have an occasion for cooking. Well, that would change, she thought, as she stood looking at her cabinets. Lydia would have a dinner party. This day was just getting better and better. A party. That was what the situation called for. She would start right away planning a menu and ordering invitations. Lydia slammed her palm down on the granite counter-top, and she would only invite women.

Lydia turned on the music and as she opened a bottle of wine. In the coolness of the refrigerator, two more bottles were tucked away in the vegetable crisper.

Lydia

Posted in Houston, Recovery, Short Story by

Lydia liked to drink alone. She liked to drink with people too, liked the camaraderie, the gradual loosing of ties as the twinkle of laughter increased in volume and frequency. But drinking, Lydia thought, was best done in solitude. Only alone could she shape her environment perfectly. And only alone could Lydia drink the quantity she wanted without having to hear that irritating throat clearing sound Henry makes when he feels like she had had enough. Who did he think he was, monitoring her drinking? Every time he did it, Lydia wanted to punch him straight in the throat. But alone, in the house, Lydia was happy. Today, Lydia planned to be happy.

Whether or not she knew it conscientiously, Lydia had a routine surrounding her alone drinking. Far from the casualness that once surrounded the popping of the occasional bottle of wine, Lydia’s routine surrounded a very complex series of deceptions.

Lydia had long stopped going to the local Spec’s Liquor Store for fear of being judged by the counter help. One afternoon, Lydia walked in with her usual nonchalance. The counter girl looked up as Lydia entered and politely pointed out that the Smirnoff was on quantity sale, buy six bottles and Lydia would get 10 percent off. Lydia spun around and stared at the girl through the dark tint of her Gucci sunglasses. The girl showed no signs of being derisive. In fact, she looked like she was being helpful. Maybe she did not even know Lydia mostly drank vodka out because she incorrectly believed it lacked odor. Lydia looked at the girl for a couple more seconds. She bought her liquor that day, but made it white rum and kept it to a single bottle. She hadn’t been back since, except for a emergency bottle every now and then.

Lydia got into her car on the blistering Houston afternoon to make the long drive to the store before rush hour traffic. Lydia resented how much her actions, even drinking, even buying the alcohol, were dominated by what others thought of her. Lydia wanted nothing more than to be left alone to be who she was. Some days she felt every part of her was a fictitious reflection of someone’s opinion of who they thought she ought to be.

As she drove down Memorial Drive, Lydia reflected back on the person she thought she might have been back before she got cancer. Just like that, with not a skip of a heartbeat, anger exploded in her chest. It was the god-damn cancer! Every time. Lydia slammed her fist down on the armrest of her car. It changed everything. It changed how her parents and friends thought of her, with that worrisome pitying in their eyes. Oh, she’s so strong, they would say. Lydia might have portrayed strength, but she certainly didn’t feel it. What Lydia felt was terrifying, heart-wrenching despair. She was too young to die. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. That was what Henry had seen in her. That is what she had fallen in love with. Henry didn’t need her to be strong. He knew, somehow, that she wasn’t strong. Lydia slammed on the brakes as she almost read-ended the Mercedes in front of her. With a flick of her thumb across her cheek, she wiped away her tears. Lydia turned up her radio. Fuck him. Fuck ‘em all.

I Dream an Alcoholic’s Dream III

Posted in Houston, Recovery by

I dream an alcoholic’s dream

Of insanity.

With broken bottles at my feet

And a car wrapped ’round a tree,

Walking through Houston’s streets,

I wonder, how this can be me?

 

I dream an alcoholic’s dream

Of abhorrancy.

With no money, I cajole,

From my family I stole,

Within me there’s this hole

I wonder, where can be my soul?

 

I dream an alcoholic’s dream

Of serenity.

I dream this ride will finally end.

And of finding one true friend.

I wonder, can this life I transcend?

 

I dream an alcoholic’s dream

Of recovery.

With laughing children at my feet

And a house with blooming trees,

Walking through the shady streets,

I wonder, how can this be me?

Of course, I would have people read more.

Posted in Houston, Recovery by

Hi Mrs. Ann!
Here are the questions. Thank you again for helping me out!

Questions:
1. Do you think that there is too much hate in today’s society?

I do think there is too much hate, but I think any hate would be too much. Hate is a powerful word that carries strong connotations. Hate is not annoyance or irritation. Hate is anger and fury and spite.

2. Do you think there is too much love in today’s society?

I have found through the course of my life, a surprising amount of love on the planet. It sometimes appears from the unlikeliest people and manifests in ways that never cease to amaze me. But, if you ask me if there is too much if it… No, I think we could probably do with a little more.

3. Is there any personal experience that is behind your opinion?

A little over seven years ago, I can to the realization and understanding that I was an alcoholic. My life was very sad. And especially lonely. I did not know what to do. I think now, that I could have probably gone to my family and asked for help; my family is kind. But at the time, that idea seemed too far-fetched, too humiliating, too debilitating.
So, I turned to complete strangers for help. These people, AA, showed me that I could live a better type of life. They taught me how alcohol manifests from the worst part of my psyche. Then they showed me how to be happy. I hated myself and who I was. I hated that I was a failure. That I let so many people down. But the women of AA “loved me until I could love myself.”
And they still do.

4. In general, what are some examples of too much hate and too much love?

I think one just has to look around to see examples of hate and love.

Drive down one of Houston’s freeways. You will see drivers cut one another off. Some drivers speed dangerously, swerving in and out of lanes, because where they are going is of far more importance than another’s safety. You will see drivers slow down to see if the accident is a fatality.

But you will also see people let others calmly merge. You will see people stopping at accidents to call for help and then stay to serve as witnesses.

5. Why would people in today’s society show too much hate towards others?

People have always had a fear of the unknown. There is a philosophy that says that people cannot know themselves. All one can know is what they are not. In other words, I look out in the world. You say, Ann what do you like? And there is too much of everything. How am I to know? Where do I begin? So I start by trying something, taking something, listening to something, seeing something. I say, I do not know what I like, but I know it is not that.

I think this philosophy is right.

People look out in the world and it scares them. And they see someone of a different race, who has a different culture. Rather than exploring or learning or understanding, they say, I do not know what I am, but I know I am not that. That mentality, the fear, that’s what spreads hate.

6. How would you think of solving this problem?

Of course, I would have people read more.

– Victoria

P.S Based on the answers you give me, I may make up new questions for my paper… thank you!

I Dream an Alcoholic’s Dream

Posted in Houston, Recovery by

I dream an alcoholic’s dream

Of insanity.

With broken bottles at my feet

And a car wrapped around a tree,

Walking through the city streets,

I wonder, how this can be me?

 

I dream an alcoholic’s dream

Of guilt and shame.

With no money, I cajole,

From my family I stole,

Within me there’s this hole

I wonder, where could be my soul?

 

I dream an alcoholic’s dream

Of serenity.

I dream this ride will finally end.

I dream of finding one true friend.

I dream my heart I can amend.

I hope, this life I can transcend.

Schoolbus II

Posted in Houston, Recovery, Uncategorized by

The metaphor of missing the bus is not lost on me. I’ve looked other dreams up on those online dream analyzers that also try to sell you Prozac and Viagra, but not the bus dream. It seems almost too obvious, too blatant, as if the dream analyzer program would be like, “Come on now. Really? You couldn’t figure that one out on your own?”

To be mocked by computers is one of my secret fears. Somewhere out there, someone is keeping track of all the words I need to look up on Dictionary.com and making broad statements regarding the American public school system. “You don’t know how to spell potato?” “No,” I retort. “Dan Quayle F-ed me all up, and I never recovered.”

Regardless, I spent the morning once again lost in thought, trying to pinpoint the exact moment I first began “missing the bus.”

Maybe it was last year when I took that job everyone told me not to take, at the inner city school where no one else wanted to work, as some sort of screwed up attempt at societal amends.

Maybe it was when my brother first told me I was an alcoholic. I listen to him on the other end of the telephone as I poured myself another drink.

Maybe it was when I was eighteen and my father said something. Instead of backing down, I said something too. And with that, I loaded up my 1983 yellow Honda Accord Hatchback with my duffel bag and enough anger to last a lifetime, and headed east out of Houston.

But in the dream, I am a kid. This leads me to think, I must have missed the bus really early on in life. I wonder what happened that day.

04.09.14

Last week, I was talking to a co-worker. He said, “The reason writers drink is because they ca’t write anymore. Hemingway drank when he couldn’t write. He couldn’t express himself.”

I thought for a moment, cocked my head to the side. “Nope. No, I don’t think that’s right.”

I was a cute kid with chubby, pink cheeks, and a big mop of unruly blonde hair. Even though the only videos of me are the silent reel to reel kind, one can see me chuckling, my whole body shaking. What you can’t see in that silent reel to reel was my speech impediment. My Rs sounded like Ws. Till I was in fifth grade my name was “Ann Kwogwa.” While this added to my overall cuteness, it made me painfully self-conscious.

William’s Prize Winning Chicken

When no one can understand you, you stop talking. When you’re alone and silent, restless, irritable, discontent, you pick up a pen and start to write. My need to escape existed long before I found alcohol.

At thirty, I would get sober. I am still not sure how that happened. I sat in the back of a meeting and cried the whole way all through. At the end of the hour, I walked up to the front and got my desire chip. For the next several months, I attended multiple meetings a day. I did not think recovery would work. I just couldn’t think of any other place to go or anything else to do. I remember thinking, “These people seem fairly happy. Maybe it’s okay that I will never be able to go out to dinner or dance or write ever again.” That’s how intertwined drinking had become in my life. I just couldn’t imagine going out for dinner and not ordering a glass of wine. Well, I thought, sober people just don’t go out to dinner. (It’s when they invited me to join that I realized that sober people only eat in groups. That way they can keep an eye on each other.)

But writing was the hardest of all to give up. It saddened me. And yet, I knew writing was an impossibility. For the last many years of my life, a ritual surrounded my writing. It always involved me trying to reach, and maintain, a very specific level of inebriation. I needed the liquor to make the thoughts flow, but not so much to blur me into incomprehensible gobbledygook. While I would like to think that some days I was successful in this tightrope walk, I highly doubt I ever was.

See? It’s not that I drank because I couldn’t write. I couldn’t write because I am a drunk. And when I drink, I annihilate everything else around me.

For months after I got sober, I could not sit at a computer without wanting a drink. My hand would involuntarily reach for the highball which was not there. It made my palms sweat and my heart race. One day, I just stopped sitting at computers.

And I learned to talk instead. I don’t think my support group knows how little I talked before I got sober. Everything went on paper. Everything was processed through the written word. I remember my mom sitting me down one day and asking me to please stop saying, “You know what I mean?” after ever sentence. “Of course we know what you mean.” I didn’t ask that question so often because I thought the man next to me was an idiot. I asked because I feared the words coming out of my mouth were a jumble of random thoughts often supported by my mumble and odd vernacular. I’m not sure if what I am speaking is even English sometimes. Y’know what I mean?

In the fall of 2010, I went back to school. With a couple years of sobriety, I knew only two things. Be honest. Ask for help. My second week of school, I stayed after one of my classes. I approached my professor and said in the flurry of words that only the brave and the stupid use, “I don’t know how to write, I use to know how to write, but now I don’t know how to write, I got sober and now I can’t, I mean, I don’t know how to, and a five paragraph paper, I mean, see, I’m old and I’ve been out of school a long time.”

The teacher looked at me for what felt like an excruciatingly long and uncomfortable length of time. Skeptically, she quietly and slowly stated, “We don’t do five paragraph papers in college.” And somehow that is all I needed to hear. A giant smile crossed my lips. I knew what she meant. I could write how I needed to write.

I still struggle with my writing. I do not like showing to people. Or talking about it. It’s still something incredibly private and personal to me. I still live in fear. My dreams of writing are so soft and subtle, fragile and precarious; my insecurity is only barely kept in check. Some days I think one negative word will cause the entire house of cards to come crashing down.

But here I sit. Its 9:54 on a Tuesday morning. I am writing. And I am sober. I write to tell the newly sober man that sobriety can happen. I write to tell the woman with thirty days that she can go out to dinner and order a Coke. I write to tell the person with two years to continue asking for help. And I write to tell the woman in me to walk through yet another fear. For every day I proclaim I am an alcoholic. Today, I am also a writer.