Ep. 1: The Road to Recovery Is Paved with Cumstained Socks and Imagined Arguments
I sit with an empty stomach and a phone that refuses to ring. I keep catching my dog giving me the side-eye, wondering if I’ll abandon her for another cycle of decadence.
Dear Ana,
The road to recovery is paved with cumstained socks and imagined arguments. I’m 34, loneliness spurs me onward into the future while anxiety has me by the coat sleeves, pulling me back into the freezing fields of the present. Fuck me, it’s cold in a soul brimming with resentment.
I sit with an empty stomach and a phone that refuses to ring. I keep catching my dog giving me the side-eye, wondering if I’ll abandon her for another cycle of decadence.
It’s been three weeks since I last wrapped a chonky crystal in a paper bill. Three weeks since I smashed it up with the local gym’s membership card. Twenty one days since I poured the rough yellowish powder onto a white plate and almost a month since I sat listening for a day and a night. You all know the drill: some poor cunt always has to listen… But these lines only led to the end of my patience.
I know you feel alone, same as me, same as most of us these days. I know you also sit in a head cluttered with regrets, stuck for days on end, trying to convince yourself that you’re not a monster. My days go much the same way though sometimes the monotony is broken up by a three minute clip of a young twenty-something getting stuck in a washing machine.
The thought that I imagined my life going differently is ludicrous. I never had a plan, not a real one in any case. How could I? Why plan for the future when my present was strung together by nights of revelry, distilled with childish love and the promise of never-ending Fridays.
I’ll have you know that a dive bar is a good place, as any, to find a wife, less so when it comes to a husband. It is also the proper context for all discussions that tackle the spirit of religion and western geopolitics. Nothing like a twice university dropout drunkenly screaming NAMASTE into your general direction, the constant barrage of saliva hitting your face long past the point of being acknowledged.
Much against popular belief, a dive bar is also the proper context in which to find role models and build lasting friendships. You never truly know a man until you can see with how much grace he is able to wipe the vomit from his chin; The elegance with which he stumbles, tripping over spit and snot, to order another round of shots about an hour after last call.
A fairy-tale of the Balkans, a rogues’ gallery of characters to hold my hand as I walked the white bricked road to learning about love, camaraderie and becoming a walking, talking, peter-pan syndrome.
The one plan, to coalesce from these days, only dealt with making them last forever…
I know you feel alone, as do I. The broken promises that hurt the most being the ones you made to yourself. You and I, we’re in an abusive relationship with life, with love, with an insatiable fucking hunger for adventure and the cold, hard truth that we aren’t willing to grow up. A perpetual sadness we live with, day by day, doing our best to hide it all the while nourishing it, for years, until it becomes the only fucking beauty in our life.
But I refuse to spend my life building an empire of dirt, Ana. To procrastinate from the corpse of one dream to the other until there’s one, last, cold body left to lie to. I’m done counting cobwebs in this dusty old crack-den I pace around in my head.
How many more days, Ana? How many more months or years in which resentment festers inside you, turning into bitterness? How many more great ideas to drag out your long dead passion, only to discard them at the first obstacle? How many more outbursts of anger that turn into shame and how many more fucking food-delivery napkins will you use to wipe your ass because you’re too much of a lazy cunt to go buy the most basic essentials?
How many more calls will you ignore? How many messages that seek out your company? Only to be disgruntled once the invitations stop coming…
How many more friends are you willing to lose? How much more abuse are you willing to take just to keep them around without actually being around them?
Tell me something, Ana: How many more remarks will get your blood boiling? How many more nights will you spend ruminating over what anybody said to you? How much more power are you willing to give the negative voices ONLY BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT YET CONFIDENT IN WHO YOU ARE?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fill and now that I’ve got three weeks under my belt I ain’t stopping for anything. I’m not stopping and I’ll drag your sorry ass with me. I’ll write you every week. I’ll write you twice a week. We’re gona’ pull a fuckin’ Captain Planet here and through the power of friendship we’ll walk this road together.
It’s been a long while coming, Ana, but as a first ever: I can see a better time, when all our dreams come true.
