Anniversary

I am sober today two years.

I should have died. I tried to. I turned yellow. I got so skinny my clothes were falling off. I puked and cried and stank as the toxins left me.

My eyes were always wet from crying and yellow and dry from my flagging liver.

I was held and taught to hold myself. To live in the NOW and trust it. To not dwell on the past or what I thought my future was going to look like.

The desert of the Texas panhandle and the canyons saved me. Masibindi saved me.

I saved me. I haven’t craved alcohol since. I don’t know what the switch was that fell, but I am grateful for it every day.

I’m convinced that being in that magical place, in the Texas desert in my least favorite part of the year, was what did it. Something had to break inside of me for the shell to open, like a bluebonnet seed needing damage to sprout.

Seventeen years in a bottle. I should have died. I tried to, but I failed as I did in so many things. My marriage, my religion, my family, my tribe, all of my friends, everything left me. Or I left them.

I lost the love of my life. I tried to die. And then I was there, hardly able to sit upright, with a newly poured full drink in front of me, to the brim. I remember looking at it, smelling it, smelling me. And I couldn’t take another sip. It hurt. Everything hurt. Tunnel vision was only that drink and I shut it down and ran.

Ran to the desert, to quiet reflection looking at the ants crawl across the sand because I had to try to think about anything other than the gagging and puking and dry heaving I’d been doing for three days because I couldn’t keep anything down.

Apologizing repeatedly because I had to run to the bathroom to stand in a way I knew so well because I’d lived that way for weeks now and this was my reality but still I’d breathe and get through this.

Drawing hot baths under the starry night sky in a water trough so I could soak in the moon’s rays and heal while J sat and talked to me about Masibindi and how beautiful she would become.

I cry now because it was such a beautiful miserable painful time and yet I miss those days of simplicity and wild bees and honey and quiet ghostly abandoned towns and canyons that bloomed green out of the red desert like a glorious lush vulva, slick and cold and mossy and damp.

The desert held me and healed me as the dogs Tucker and Porter sat at my side, watching the sun set, smelling the moisture settle on the dust outside, hearing J splash in the moon bath on the porch. The giant windmills would blink in unison, like slow eyes of a drowsy cat, and the Now was beautiful and serene and just what it needed to be.

Two years ago today I didn’t just fight to survive new sobriety, I fought to rebirth myself, and it was bloody and yellow and smelly and I was terrified the entire time.

But I made it. I haven’t looked back, only forward, even if I lost my way a little again I still haven’t touched booze for two years. I have the Now, I have me, a tribe, my son, a family of my own making, and they’re worth it. I’m worth it. And I always have been. I’m learning that now.