The day I moved out of the house I shared with my wife, I drove to Boulder, dropped my suitcases off at a friend’s empty apartment, and walked to my favorite Mexican restaurant. I went for the margaritas. They had a secret recipe and a three drink limit. I put away a bowl of green chile and two salty rimmed margs. On the walk back to the apartment, I passed a stringy haired guy smoking a joint.
Four years earlier when Coloradoans voted to legalize recreational marijuana, I had decided to quit getting high. After all those years of desperate calls to every stoner I knew and dozens of sketchy hookups, I could walk into an actual store and have marijuana handed to me in a sealed bag emblazoned with the dispensary’s name. But by then, I was only getting high every once in a while. In the eyes of my wife, it was still too much. She never came right out with her disapproval but always had a comment about my blood shot eyes, the change in my voice, the smell of it on my skin. I didn’t like the way being stoned felt under her gaze.
Over the years, I’d become milder, more palatable to her. She’d come into the relationship with trust issues, and I’d come with a long record of secret keeping and betrayals. Determined to prove my trustworthiness, I crammed myself into a glass box, became wholly transparent. Knowing she could sniff even the hint of a lie on me, I stopped lying. Avoider of conflict, avoider of all hard things, I stopped doing anything that made her uncomfortable. I stopped making new friends. I stopped seeing old friends that felt threatening. I stopped telling stories about my sorted past. I stopped telling stories. At first, the box was a little cramped, but as the years went on, I became smaller and the box more livable.
For the first time, I was an open book. Go ahead and look through my phone. Listen in on my conversation with my sister, my colleague, my best friend. Read my journal. I’m not writing anymore anyway. I had morphed into something tepid and benign.
Maybe that’s why I turned back that afternoon and asked the man on the sidewalk for a hit. The wild, reckless girl I’d been was chomping at the bit. The next day, I drove to a dispensary and bought myself three perfectly rolled joints.
Soon after my marriage ended, I moved to New York, hoping unfamiliar geography and a couple thousand miles between us would temper the heartache. New York had also legalized marijuana, but the few dispensaries were for medical card holders only. Luckily, I knew someone who knew someone who’d deliver pot right to your Upper West Side door. Alone in a brand new city with Covid still lingering, weed and wine became my BFFs.
I was newly retired, newly single, and in a city where no one was looking. The little rebel I’d kept quiet for years was let loose. I’m not sure when my small life in the big city began to arrange itself around alcohol. Weed had always existed without a time table. Maybe because pot had never been socially sanctioned the way booze had, smoking morning, noon, or night always felt a little naughty. It was a tiny insurrection against the reality that, instead of raging against the machine as planned, I ended up a married middle school teacher living in the suburbs. But I knew, as a responsible drinker, the uncorking of Cabernet could not commence until evening.
With no one watching, my first pour began earlier and quickly turned into two, three, four, five. When friends came to town, I’d pre lubricate so I could partake of the appropriate one or two glasses with dinner. If I went on a trip, I would pack Sutter Home single serving size bottles and vodka shooters, sneak to the bathroom and gulp them down or feign sleepiness and “go to bed early”.
I bought a house and moved back to Colorado with my cat, who didn’t mind that I’d take a cup of coffee and my one hitter to the back patio in the mornings to water the flowers. I began buying boxed wine because throwing away a few boxes each week seemed less awful than the sound of nine or ten clanking bottles as I rolled my trash bin to the curb. I signed up for the rewards program at my closest dispensary and earned redeemable points every time I stopped in.
I joked about becoming an alcoholic, about being a middle aged stoner. The half truths made it less secretive and more laughable. Surely, a person wouldn’t say such things if it were true. The voice, the small annoying one that sounded a lot like me but said all the stuff I didn’t want to hear, started interrupting my justifications more often, and so I set up my own little guardrails, only three glasses of wine a night, so much better than a whole bottle. I bought alcohol free wine. Between each glass of the real stuff, I’d pour a glass of Fre’, load my itty bitty pipe, and head to the garage for a quick toke.
Never wanting anyone to see my glazed eyes or hear my tongue thicken and slow, by late afternoon I’d stop answering the phone. I’d watch tv, eat handfuls of goldfish and almonds, and when I felt sufficiently wasted, walk a mostly straight line to my bathroom where I would brush my teeth, take out my contacts, and put myself to bed. Drinking didn’t make me mean or messy. It made me subdued, half hearted, less. I’d done it again, this time cramming myself into a bottle.
I suppose I’ve always tried to dull the edges of this tricky life. Wanting to stave off the hurt and rage and loneliness, I used drugs and drink as a way to compartmentalize, to avert my eyes.
Today marks forty days since my last sip or smoke. I didn’t make a big declaration. I tiptoed out of the weeds and wine, not wanting to alert anyone. I wanted to slip quietly and unnoticed into sobriety.
I haven’t headed for the nearest AA meeting, can’t imagine the blandness of my story compared to the real rock bottomers. When I thought about reaching the step where I make amends, I couldn’t come up with a single person I’d slighted, at least not due to drinking, except myself. The first night I went to bed sober I whispered an earnest apology to my lungs, my liver, my heart.
There hasn’t been a lightning bolt revelation. I’m not glowing. I’m not different. Not yet. But I feel something happening, maybe something even better than luminescent skin or enlightenment. I feel a space opening up inside of me. I feel myself unfurling from the cramped position I put myself in. This morning, waking without shame, there is room to stretch, move, breathe, become.
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