Re-Birthday

I woke to a glorious morning today. Thunderstorms last night washed the humidity away and left every branch and leaf I passed with glittering morsels of light. The dew hung heavier with the raindrops that didn’t fall from leaves.

A gift for my re-birthday.

My eyes aren’t stained with tears this morning. Three years ago today I thought they’d never end. The beginning of my sobriety came after endless bottles of cheap vodka that I still can smell, and it wrinkles my nose with the memory.

I thought I’d cried all the tears I had, and was dehydrated from poisoning my body for years, but they still came. I remember seeing them, smelling them, smelling me.

It’s amazing how much our bodies can take. How the scent of what we put into them lingers. I smelled of a rusty old whiskey still, my very blood acrid and bitter and biting me from within. My eyes yellow, crusted from old mascara and tears dried overnight. My fingernail beds were stained the color of a smoker’s walls, a nasty stink of rot hung over me.

I hadn’t been able to eat for days. I got my calories from the bottles of vodka littering my hiding places. My belly was swollen from a suffering liver. My soul bruised from the love I’d lost, she was then the love of my life, and I knew it. And she was gone.

I sobered up enough to drive to my blood-sister Amanda’s house, and paced her bedroom, watched the walls, cried alone, puked everything I had into their toilet, hoping that I could vomit the words to make everything alright within me. I’d brought two fresh 1.75 liter bottles in my car, if I didn’t have them I’d be sick. Trapped in a cycle of drinking, my body wasn’t able to let it go until it was almost ready to let it ALL go, to let me fall asleep and not wake up. I wanted it to happen. I was terrified it would.

I can still remember the last drink I poured, the juice mix, the amount I put in the cup. A very large one, the size they hand you when you super-size your drive-thru meal. Half-full of vodka, it was barely enough to make me feel even close to functional. I remember how the sides of the cup bent when I carried it back to my room, lifted it to my lips.

But I couldn’t drink it. Even thinking of sipping it made me gag, and I rushed out of the room to the bathroom on the other side of the wall, and threw up what I’d had before I passed out, then woke, then needed more. More in this cup, poured by my own hand, more to numb me, more to pacify the shakes that wouldn’t leave my hands anymore, the trembling of my arms and legs.

But I couldn’t drink it.

I still can’t explain it, how my body rebelled. I couldn’t see straight, but I walked to Amanda’s bedroom and handed the cup to her husband, telling him don’t waste it.

I was more scared than I can recall ever being. The shakes increased with my anxiety, but I gathered my things, knowing I didn’t have much time before I was truly sick. I drove through thunder and lightning to the panhandle of Texas, away from everything I knew and loved. There was no choice, no free will within the decision. My body made it for me. Just as my body chose to not take that sip, because I didn’t have the strength to do it myself.

I remember I saw a giant wild boar on my right side as I drove, when I got close to my destination. It was rooting in the endless acres beside me, free, never having known the touch of man. How I wished to be that boar, and not myself.

There was no bottle in my car, and it terrified me so much I’d pull over to vomit on the side of road, I was sister to the vast landscape, and the haunting emptiness around made me feel less alone.

The desert held me close and hasn’t let me go. I found beauty in what was desolate. And discovered it echoed how completely blown apart and vacant I felt inside. I couldn’t fill me up with vodka any longer, my body rejected it that Last Holy Significant Time, and rebirth began. It was bloody, and full of rot, smelled of pus and old sick, and I wished I could finally give in and fall asleep and never wake again. I wished it more fervently than I ever had before.

Because it hurts, birth does. It’s tiptoeing the line between life and death, coming from awareness of very little to an overwhelming explosion of sights and smells and sounds that you’d been muffled from before. Sensations overcame me in a cacophony that my body and mind couldn’t comprehend anymore because I’d hidden in a bottle for seventeen years at that point and didn’t allow myself to feel.

There was no longer a buffer between myself and the world, and it was hot and sticky and the skies baked the ground as my brain swilled about my skull trying to figure out which way was up and why had I let myself get here. Why hadn’t I just let myself die? Why was I so afraid to live?

And as the stars spelled my heart above moon baths out in the desert night I’d soak the heat of the day into the water, and not even realize I was crying until my tears were tracks of all the paths I could have taken to not. end. up. here.

But here I was, and the Now saved me, because time is a construct and Now was all I had to hold on to. And it was enough, just as I had to believe I was enough, that my life means something.

Even if I was jaundiced in the desert in the middle of nowhere, a small consciousness in our vast galaxy, I became worthy of saving. I just had to almost lose my life to realize it. My body chose sobriety for me, but I had to choose to keep living.

And it took some time afterwards…it still is…because forgiveness is only easy when I give it to someone else.

But I am discovering I deserve to spend the time making things right again between the me I was and the one I am now.

Because I am the love of my life.

Happy Re-Birthday.