I didn’t even think of it as writing, really, just typing. It was like I was writing to a friend, only I didn’t know which friend. I wrote about not knowing what to do with myself, my hands especially. Those first few lines simply announced my return from rehab to nobody in particular. I walked over and sat, opened a new text document and started to type. My computer was on this table, anchored to it by its sheer size and weight. Which left me with a throbbing and inflamed corpuscle of an issue I had to face immediately: Now what?Īcross from where I sat was a round wooden table and a plastic patio chair. And while it was satisfying to have the debris picked up and air that smelled pleasingly like freshly wiped car windows, the fact remained that four in the afternoon was simply too early for bed.
Couches were ridiculously pointless unless you had an actual receptionist and maintained office hours. I felt like I’d been accidentally locked inside a psychotherapist’s waiting room after hours. It was possibly the first time I’d actually used the couch for sitting. Then I sat on the custom-made couch I’d purchased several years earlier and had only used as a sort of open-format clothes dresser. I stacked the mail that had collected into two neat piles: bills to throw in the trash and pretend never arrived and mail-order catalogues for later, bedtime reading. So I sprayed Windex on things and rubbed paper towels over them, and with my free hand I clutched my phone and spoke to my cousins and my grandmother.
In the past, periods of sobriety would be spent making apologies to people for various things I did to them while under the influence. I supposed they did things like clean, speak to friends on the phone and drop their kids off at gymnastics practice. What did normal people do when they weren’t drinking? And I had no idea what to do with my sober self.
I was feeling nearly electrified with the discomfort of existing with a blood alcohol level at zero. It’s just that I’d written this journal only for me it wasn’t polite enough or interesting enough or funny enough for anyone else to read.ĭrybegan as nothing more ambitious than a journal I started the day I returned to New York City from rehab in Minnesota. Not because I revealed anything particularly secret beyond run-of-the-mill complaints about my brother’s greasy metallic aroma or the lack of buying power afforded by my pittance of an allowance. When I was a kid, one of my many phobias was that somebody would read my diary.
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