Forever sucks. You learn that in school with Tuck Everlasting, I guess. Or that Disney Channel movie The Other Me, where a kid clones himself and sends the clone to school while he stays home to play video games. He realizes video games forever sucks. Especially when your clone is hanging out with all your friends.
Point is, forever obviously sucks; I knew that when I - I guess at age nine according to google, jesus - absorbed media made for children. I’m talking about a different kind of forever. The kind I can’t help but project into every day, doing anything.
The thought of not drinking again forever sucks pretty hard. I keep saying sucks because I’m trying to force myself not to express this idea too dramatically. It’s maybe obvious and shouldn’t be poeticized. If I just think, ah well, today I’m not going to drink, or I’m not going to have a drink right now, or I won’t drink till next Tuesday, then it is dead easy. You could probably tally up all the till-next-Tuesdays one by one and make it to forever without realizing.
I am doing quite well in that regard. I am comfortably turning away from forever because it feels so good to not be drinking today or till next Tuesday. It is way easier than I thought it would be. The first few days were hard. I think it was boredom. It felt good knowing that I’d told someone (by which I mean that I wrote it in this place), that I’d told someone I can’t picture.
Telling my friends was not helpful. They insisted the holidays were a bad time to quit. Just wait until “Dry January,” they said. I didn’t tell them these were things I’d first told myself before deciding they were excuses not to start today and that if I didn’t start today I probably never would, unless I got this weird feeling at another inopportune time in another year or two. I just told them I was an alcoholic and I was being vulnerable by telling them anything at all and that I wanted to live. They laughed. I think that’s the response I wanted, I don’t know.
But I drank on Christmas Eve and Day and New Year’s Eve anyway. It was alright. I was a vegan for four years and now I’m no longer a vegan and I often wonder how many animals’ lives I could save by simply eating meat and dairy as a tiny portion of my diet my whole life, rather than swinging between extremes every few years. The day I started eating meat again, I was very hungry. I would like to abstain from drinking for a while, but I would not like to come out of this very very thirsty.
I have been loving making coffee at night now, the part of the day when I’d usually start drinking. A small strong decaf from the aeropress, poured over sparkling water - or tonic with a lemon peel if I’m feeling bad.
Coffee is the one thing that eludes fatigue by forever-ness. Every morning it tastes just as delicious as the day before. It makes me just as happy as the day before. Is anything else in this category? Even your lover’s face stales with time. Tiramisu is heaven but not every day. I get tired of people and things, tired of myself most intensely, tired of drinking water even, tired of many dull aches of wanting. Coffee stands in perfect poetic opposition to all that, like Azaro’s mother, a loving face that welcomes the baby as he first opens his eyes, not wanting to be born, deciding upon seeing her, to stay in this world, for her.