I ended up buying a MegaBus ticket last night from Chicago to Memphis. The bus leaves around 10PM and travels through the night to reach Memphis at 8AM, where I'll meet my Mom, drive the hour back home, and get to see the damage for myself.
My hope is to do all I can while I'm there and then be able to be a sober traveling companion for the Brazilian girl from New York, who needs someone to come along with here for a two-week stretch of vacation starting in mid-August. I'll have to see whether or not I can do this without leaving my family hanging - the next few days will tell.
Cutting my travels short for now hasn't been as hard as I imagined it would be - being in Chicago right now makes me sad - noticing each new, neat part of the city reminds me of my time here as a reclusive closet drunk, how many people, places, and activities I've cheated myself out of experiencing. I thought it was just a matter of getting out more and conquering a few, surface-level fears, but there are deeper problems that I still have to uncover. I can't blame this all on alcohol, but drinking never helped me solve these problems and has become a dangerous distraction.
I'm not in denial about needing not to drink indefinitely, but I am unsure of whether I'll ever be able to drink again.
I drank my first beer at 14, or first four beers more exactly. I'd sneak out of the house in the dead of night wearing a long sleeved shirt over a tee shirt. The long sleeved shirt was for the Coors Light, which never failed to be sitting in a cooler in the back of this one pickup truck that I knew of. I would take off my long sleeved shirt and wrap up the brews, my little bundle of midnight mischief.
I wasn't a big fan of the taste, and the fourth beer almost always made me puke at first. I would go maybe once, sometimes twice a week. I learned how to let out the extra air in my stomach with well-timed burps to not feel queasy and began to enjoy the progression of my buzz. One night, I found a half-full pint of liquor in the cooler; this was very exciting, since I'd never had liquor before. I took the bottle back to my house and sat up in the attic drinking it until empty. When I tried to climb from the attic, my legs wouldn't work. I stumbled, wobbled, and passed out. I woke up with the morning light on the carpet below the pull-down attic door with a little puddle of vomit next to my mouth - my guess is that I crawled onto the door, and it swung open to deposit my drunk adolescent ass on the carpet.
In Chicago, while I worked part-time jobs and had long windows of time that could have been used for writing and exploring, I chose to buy a six pack of Special Export pints nearly every day. I'd hide many of the cans in the bottom of the trash before my ex got home. I sometimes made multiple trips in a day or bought a bottle of wine too for chugging, since the beer really did take too long to react with my stomach. I started getting red spots on the inside of my legs after doing this for several months.
I blamed the red spots on the beer and starting buying fifths of vodka or rum to make mixed drinks. This made me feel classier, as if I had solved a problem in a refined manner. I would also sometimes take little breaks from drinking - sometimes even a week or so - and pat myself on the back for my show of self-restraint. I was still doing all this before my second surgery to halt any possible cancer spread.
Looking back this morning on this and all the massive amounts of college drinking that came in between, I think "holy shit, that was me." I'm also startled and touched that my ex put up with me for so long. And I'm surprised and scared that I put up with myself for so long.
So hell no, I'm not in denial about not needing to not touch a drop for a very long time... but for the rest of my life. Will I ever be able to enjoy just a single glass of wine with dinner or go out with a long-time friend for a few drinks (2 or less)? Past studies point to NO.
Even a week ago, I was fantasizing about how I'd have dead drunk Detroit adventures. I'm turning 24 very soon and realize that I've never had any solid notions of who I wanted to be or where I wanted to go, other than vague notions of being a mysterious, traveling writer-drunk. This makes me very sad.
I'm leaving the bed and breakfast in the next hour and thinking of ways to spend the next 8 hours toting around my baggage in downtown Chicago before having to make my bus. There are no more bars for me to waste time at, so I feel clueless. That's it for now.
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