Day 40 - A recap leading up to Day 0, pt 1

Like most good stories (and quite a few terrible ones) I started this in the middle, and find myself in need of a recap, a flashback, if you will....

FADE IN.

EXT. A COLLEGE CAMPUS - NIGHT

Pan across a state collage campus, street lights coming on, casting shadows into the distance. Pan up a dorm room building as lights flicker on. 

INT. A DORM ROOM

Three guys and two girls stand around a dresser in a coed dorm room. Boxes, suitcases, and other signs of having recently moved in are scattered over the floor. A bottle of Bacardi 151 and five shots sit on the dresser. JASON picks up one of the shots, hands another to DAVID, and points to the shots, the girls, then FRED.

JASON

                                      Look, FRED, I know you said you don't drink, but if

                                      you don't take these shots then these fine ladies will                                                 

                                      have to take them for you.

FRED

                                      Well, if it's for the ladies....

Ok. That's enough of that. Let's just say that if you don't count one poorly planned night a few years prior, I didn't start drinking until about three days after I moved into my dorm and I didn't stop until I had failed quite spectacularly out of university less than a year and a half later. 

I actually appealed the expulsion under the ADA, claiming that I was an alcoholic and that my grades from the previous semester should be overturned because of my underage drinking. This might have actually been true, since I was drinking until I puked at least four nights a week. 

The appeal failed, but the label stuck. Mostly, I kept claiming I had a problem so that I could convince my parents they hadn't just wasted an exorbitant amount of money for no good reason. This was before I learned that reasons and excuses don't change reality, and the reality was that I had fucked up good. 

Regardless, at 19, I had branded myself an alcoholic, been kicked out of school, and was about to make a decision that would shape the next decade of my life. Of course, I went to meetings, stayed sober, lived the next eleven years clean, and got my life together, right?

Sure, that might have been how things went, if it hadn't been for my trip to Mexico about a year later.

Day 39: The Cacophony, and why I stopped drinking

I’ve always prided myself on my hearing ability. Maybe it’s better than other people’s, maybe it’s not, but the point is, I think that it is at least better than average. 

Growing up, I learned that what I overheard through walls helped me get a better feel for what to expect when I went through a door, and that could make the difference between needing to tiptoe and hide and getting to run around and play. 

As I got older, I learned to love secrets. Barely whispered nothings that people thought they were keeping to themselves, but were no match for my self proclaimed highly honed hearing. Out on the town, I began to talk less and less, preferring instead to listen to other people’s conversations, bits of stories that I’d never know otherwise because I’m at best a background character in their lives. 

Soon, one conversation wasn’t enough. Maybe the first one I heard wasn’t interesting enough. Maybe I was just worried that no matter how interesting the one I was listening too was, the one I wan’t listening too could be amazing. It became like juggling, bouncing from one conversation to the next to another and back again, keeping them all floating in the air, floating in the air with them. But at some point, it becomes too much. 

Instead of running from empty movie theater to empty movie theater, catching glimpses of the show, I was instead thrust into a mosh pit of sound, unable to make any sense of the words I’m hearing, buffeted on a wave of noise that I can’t get myself to stop trying to hear. 

There are only two ways I know for sure to quiet it. The first is to leave, to step away to where I can no longer hear the people and the stories and the sound, and collect myself. The other is to drink. When I drink, the voices are silenced and my focus narrows down to one voice, my own, made stupid by the drinking.

 On nights like tonight, if I try to stay, and stay sober, another voice joins the chorus, another voice pounding like a drum. Drink. Drink. Drink. Drink. Drink. The pain in my head doesn’t lessen, I can’t focus, even on that one drumbeat. But I know how to stop it. I know how to make it all go away. Drink. Drink. Drink. That voice is terrifying because I know it will eventually break me. Drink. Tonight, I held strong. Tonight, I kept back the cacophony. But I had to leave, before I gave in. 

I’ve stopped drinking, for now, because I’m tired of giving in, and I’m tired of being afraid, of that voice, of myself, and of the world around me.