Ascent and Descent

SanFran is like the crisis hot lines that tell potential suicides, “You are never alone”. Here, you really aren’t ever alone. Everywhere you look, there is someone to remind you they are there. There they are, crossing against a light. And there, catching your hair in the corner of their open umbrella. And there, letting their fluffy, white poodle crap in the middle of the sidewalk. Everywhere you turn, there is someone else to remind you just how miserable they are, too.

I find out quickly that this doesn’t help. If anything, it only reminds me how disconnected I am. After a few weeks, I ride seven stops on the red line with one person’s hand on my ass and another person’s sour armpit five inches from my face. I still emerge through the sliding glass doors unruffled because I’m troubled by something bigger. Even in Powell, amid the throngs of people that shoulder by me, I feel the thump of loneliness. From the outside, it’s hard to imagine life can exist inside the mirrored skyscrapers, when I walk by and all I can see is my own drained little face staring back.

The life of a young drunk is not a continual fall into the pit of abject alcohol abuse. It is a herky-jerky evolution. You slip, you trip, and you tumble into the habit when you are afraid, or enraged, or heartsick, and every so often, you hit a ledge from which you can see how deep into dependence you are. Every so often, you feel so lost in the hollow of your own need that you decide to try to hoist yourself out of it.

And I think I should be able to clamber out. I should be able to rise above my voracity for vodka because there are people everywhere, reminding me that this is a life-stage behavior that every girl eventually outgrows. But that kind of climb is not easy, it is not even possible, when you have no other reserves of strength. When all your endurance is tied up in drinking, there is nothing else that can hold you. Without it, you tire in no time. I get scared, I surrender, and I’ll slide even deeper into drinking.