Recovery and Uncertainty

Lately I find myself drifting towards anonymity, an uneasy solitude that stretches endlessly towards a vast unknown, an inevitability that comforts me as much as leaves me aghast at its existence. When my ex and I separated last year, addiction had not yet released its hold on me, and I was determined to let it do what it will; die or not, I had yet to discover there was a life beyond that which I had known for so long. I was apathetic to my fate, and complicit in my own destruction; years after the initial pleasure of my dependency had worn off it had become the only certainty in my life. I think my ex had been almost at peace with watching me drown; but when I walked out of our life together I was walking into a new reality--R. was there. In the darkness I hadn't realized he had been there all along, waiting, hand outstretched. And as he took my hand to pull me out of the abyss we ran towards an uncertain future.

I had been in and out of hospital for a decade. Addiction had slowly eaten away at me, and this past December I had become gravely ill. It was something I didn't discuss, the elephant in the room, something I desperately tried to sweep under the rug. In the years since I had started drinking my body had slowly become allergic; in the tattered remains of this last Christmas I had been nauseous for nearly a week, my body wracked with chills and a deep ache that seemed to live in my bones. My parents drove across town to see me, bedridden."I'm done drinking," I told them. And then, "When you leave please take the alcohol with you." R. had always told me that some day I would get to the point where I would break--it hadn't broken me, to be sure; I had broken myself, defiant and clinging to what little life I had in me. I awoke the next morning to an uneasy silence.  

Over the past few months I've thought of alcohol very little--not that it doesn't cross my mind in the depths of my depression--but I've come to see it as something that once was, a relationship that has ended, something I used to love but now struggle to see how. I don't need my addiction anymore--not that I ever truly did--I admit that sometimes I am afraid it will find me again, and that someday I will be too weak to resist it. But I can't dwell on that, now. Fear is what drove me to its side in the first place. I have come too far to sit and think about what was on the other side. And yet I still often struggle to fill my head with something beyond the emptiness. The struggle of recovery isn't about those difficult moments when I crave that which I used to need; it's those silent moments of nothingness, of aching, longing for something--anything--to occupy my mind. Not at work. Not when I am with R. But when I am alone with my thoughts, drowning in an uncertain evening. And there are so many uncertain evenings.

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I married R. last month, the only other human being on earth that has ever loved me for me, accepted me without hesitation, and understood my fragility in the face of a society in which neither of us have ever fit. At last we are alone together in our solitude, together in the silence that settles all around us when we shut the door to the world at the end of the day and hold one another in the darkness. That I would find my other half after a lifetime of running from a world that rejected my strangeness amazes and humbles me. If we were the last two souls on earth we would find ourselves no more isolated than we had been when others existed; it is he and I now, facing eternity, either in this life or the next, content to be with one another as much as we are content to pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist. In the depths of my addiction and depression I peered over the edge of my own existence and was shocked to discover that it wasn't darkness on the other side but the reflection of someone I had known all along, loved in secret and needed more than life itself. I needed him, to feel that I myself was needed--that my existence, as unconventional as it has been, meant something, that the madness inside my own head was tolerable because he gave me permission to exist.