Rewriting the Fairy Tale with an Alcoholic

On April 2 of this year I met a man named “H”. We had been friends on Facebook for over three years, but I didn’t actually know who he was. He would occasionally message me, or comment on my posts, but because of the friends that we had in common, and his pics, I couldn’t get a good idea of who he was. I couldn’t tell how old he was, he could have passed for early thirties or early fifties. One day I decided to take him up on his offer to meet for brunch, thinking it would be just as friends. I was dating three other guys, and had a month long trip to Italy to study wine planned for the end of the month, and was adamant that I would be going there single.

When he sat down I noticed he was actually really attractive. He was clean shaven, wore a navy blue sweater vest, had stunning features, spoke Spanish to the owner in an incredible voice, and we were about the same age. I would not have known that this was the same person from the Facebook profile. I told him that the last time I was at that restaurant it was for a Mezcal tasting. He told me that he used to love Mezcal. Because my father had esophageal issues, I assumed he might have a similar affliction. He told me that he had quit drinking, and had been sober for three months. I was so excited for and proud of him. After all, I get paid to drink for a living and I had gone the whole month of February without drinking. I knew how hard it was.

I tried to match make him with a friend of mine that I was planning on meeting up with, and the three of us went to an A’s game after brunch. We ended up spending the entire day together. H and I would catch ourselves glancing at eachother, and that night we sent several text messages back and forth. I started realizing we were flirting when I caught myself blushing in the kitchen reading my screen and waiting for his replies.

On Wednesday we went back to the restaurant for dinner, and went for a walk to the spot that appears as the banner on my blog Single in Oakland. We kissed. He spent the night. He called in sick the next day and took me on a tour of neighborhoods in Oakland that I’d never been to before. I fell in love with him over a styrofoam cup of beef consomme with fresh leaves of cilantro and crunchy diced white onion from a street vendor in Fruitvale. Over the next three weeks we had fallen madly and unquestionably in love, and had agreed to not bring up the fact that I would be gone for a month. We had both been swept off of our feet, and were looking forward to starting our life together when I returned.

At the airport, I told him that if he hooked up with someone while I was gone, he just had to be safe. I wasn’t going to expect him to stay monogamous while I was gone, and I certainly wasn’t planning on it for myself. I told him that the only thing that I cared about, was him not drinking. That he had to be strong, and do everything that he could to stay sober. We Facetimed everyday for hours. We even Facetimed on the airplane thanks to the wifi on Turkish Air. We watched Warriors games together through Facetime because we never missed a game, and I couldn’t figure out how to watch it in the hills above Alba. I talked about our future. We talked about getting married. He said he was going to buy me a ring. We talked about the massive family reunion in September, and I imagined how happy everyone would be to see him sober and becoming the incredible man that I knew him to be. I wrote a business plan for the company that we were going to start together. I outlined our days, talked about the pieces we would design and build. I would sit on hillsides overlooking vineyards, and hate how much I wanted to be home with him instead of there, alone, fulfilling my trip to Italy that was supposed to be some version of How Stella got Her Groove Back, and Eat, Pray Love.

I was walking around Rome with a chef friend of mine when I noticed that I had missed several phone calls from him, at what would have been three in the morning. I picked up in a panic. My heart sank, I got dizzy. He was completely fucked up. I wondered why he didn’t call me before that first drink. My friend wondered if the thought of me hanging out with him is what caused him to start drinking. I had no idea what to do. When he was sober there were a lot of tears shed, he was so hopeless and despondent. He said, “You know alcoholism is a disease right?” Of course I’d heard that, but I still don’t understand it being classified as a disease. And I didn’t know that relapsing was even an option for him. I didn’t know what to do from so far away except to tell him to call me next time, to stay away from whoever was drinking with him. In my mind they were the one to blame. They must have pressured him into it.

We made it through the end of the month, but I was all of a sudden plagued with the fear that he was drinking, and there was nothing that I could do about it. He picked me up from the airport in my car. I noticed an uncharacteristic smell when we hugged, but the gum he was chewing had masked anything on his breath. He couldn’t find where he’d parked my car. And then I realized that he was drunk. Like, really drunk. Like, I could have lost my home because he was driving my car drunk. The next three months would be the most difficult I’ve ever experienced in a relationship.

Now broken up once and for all, I find myself wondering how I would rewrite the story of H and I if I could. Would we have lived a happily ever after? Would I have been able to spend the rest of my life with someone that I could not share the pleasures of wine with? Would I constantly fear that he would relapse and be horrible in front of our children, and cause the sickness to be passed down to yet another generation? Would he die early of cirrhosis and leave me a widowed business owner and single mother in the middle of Mexico? Yes, is the simplest answer. Because the only way it could have turned out any different was if he had been cured. And it became evident in the last few months, that he didn’t want to be the best version of himself. He spent countless hours watching movies or soccer, fishing, and doing god knows what when he was drinking.

The fairy tale I saw was one based in nievity. He would remain sober, ayahuasca would cure him, and he’d be able to responsibly enjoy wine after that. Our passion would never subside. We would fall into makeout sessions as spontaneously as we would rhythmically walk down streets arm in arm together, in complete sync the way we did since the beginning. We would figure out the home situation, find happiness in preparing incredible meals together, in shooting hoops, walking the dogs, creating art, fishing on the coast for things we’d be able to cook and share with our friends and family. We would work hard for two years, saving as much money as we could, and buy an incredible property down in Baja to turn into our bed and breakfast. I would take Spanish classes, and he would be patient with me learning. By the time we would move down to Mexico, it would be like I’d been speaking it my entire life. His family would come down and work on remodeling the property, I would spend my days visiting farms and fisherman, wineries and coffee roasters, chocolate makers and mezcal producers, and come home to cook an elaborate meal for everyone there. I would have my recipes so dialed in that the cookbook would be written and ready to release as soon as the doors would open for paying guests. I would be pregnant around that time. The twins I had always had in the back of my mind would be here, with their names chosen years earlier when we would joke about having a family even though both of us always told the other that we didn’t want kids.

The family reunions would be massive and filled with joy. Our bed and breakfast would be built by and tended with love, and would embrace all guests with serenity and belief, that things could always be this good. That happiness was a right. H would be an amazing father and partner. While I was pregnant he would be a complete gentleman, predicting my needs, surprising me with flowers, doing the heavy lifting even though I would insist on doing everything myself. We would grow old there. Travel magazines would show our progression through the years, and always capture the love and joy that we had together, that had been there from the start. We would be acting like newlyweds into our eighties. We would spend at least a month every year traveling and discovering the world together. When one of us died, the other would not be far behind, because our bodies would know that this time together was better than either one of us ever hoped for ourselves.

I get it now. When people would tell me that three months was not a lot of time to be sober. When they would ask me how that would work, given my industry, to be with someone that couldn’t drink. When they would tell me that they didn’t want me to get hurt. When I thought I could walk out the back door at any minute, and they all said that no, I was in too deep. I get it. I spent the last three months with my life turned upside down. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life, and all of a sudden it was not only gone, it was located somewhere in the middle of a hurricane, just out of reach, that was destroying and hurting everything in its path. By the time the storm was over it would leave a trail of destruction and wounds that would leave permanent scars on trust and compassion and hope. And although I still love him, I am not in love with him. I won’t be able to look at adicts the same way without knowing first hand the pain and destruction that they have caused people that love them. I will have limited compassion for not only the addicts, but those that decided to stay with them. Which I know is complete bullshit, but there’s a limit. Now on the other side of it, I would have expected my friends to have given up. To have grown tired of my venting about stupid shit like broken promises over dinners, dashed expectations of time together, and the endless tears and heartache, just to end up back in the relationship, and hiding it from them out of shame.

So I’m out now. Just as I was congratulating myself on making it a full week without having contact with him, he texts me. I delete the texts as soon as I figure out it’s him, because I’ve deleted his contact information for the eleventeenth time. He’s sending me screenshots of Mexican love songs that he’s listening to. He’s been drinking. Of course he has. If I had gotten drunk this week I would have done the same thing. I ask if he’s okay. He doesn’t answer, but says he’s lying with his friend’s dog. I don’t respond. I want to move on. I also desperately want him back, because the dream I had was so real that I can still feel it, as if we are actually living it, because I was so sure, and so naive.