Series Regular

I am seventy-one days sober sitting at a bar drinking black tea. I haven't written in a way that feels intentionally creative in months. I think there's a very big part of me that fears I'll be faced with a gap. A tongue grazing the space where my wisdom teeth used to be. Just a big fucking hole I guess. Where I poured the booze, drained it into words then drank it up again. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. I'm well aware that this is bullshit. Intellectually, intuitively and innately I know this is all nonsense fueled by Big Alcohol advertisers preying on women and loneliness and writers. But even still, Hemingway's "write drunk edit sober" mocks me from an alleyway. A dank decaying slit between two brick buildings where a little over two months ago I probably would have squatted my legs and peed. Gripping onto my dead phone and a New York slice. Cheese and piss dripping down my cold bare ankles. A text to an ex (or two) floating somewhere in the ether. I try to remember that there's an invisible asterisk pinned against that solemnly sacred quote. *Hemingway died by suicide. Remember. 

I won't lie, sometimes I miss blackout booze girl. Don't get me wrong, I fucking love the 2.0, reincarnated, practically AI-generated poster child version of a sober self. Who goes to bed by ten and wakes up naturally at seven with a sun glow across her forehead that no longer feels like a knife. Who eats carrots and bananas. Let me repeat that. Who eats orange carrots and yellow bananas. Seventy-one days ago that sentence surely would have been posed as a question. Who eats carrots and bananas? Who drinks so much tea. Who has no desire to fuck or get fucked. Who brushes her teeth every single night. Who no longer can tolerate a film across her smile. Who stopped taking edibles. Who says no to joints. Who sits at dinner with friends in the Italian restaurant wine cellar and sips on a cucumber cooler while the friends split a bottle of white. Scenes from an Italian restaurant. Bottle of white. Who knows exactly how many glasses each girl has had. Three. One. Two. Who grocery shops every Monday. Who knows how she's getting home. Who gets triggered by non-alcoholic-induced hiccups. Who gets fucked up in her dreams and orders a vodka soda and freaks out. Subconsciously. Who wakes up relieved. Who wants nothing to do with romantic love. Who has forgotten what a hangover feels like.

I love this version. She's the shit. She earned the role of series regular and thank god for that because her charade was getting stale. But that meant her predecessor had to be killed off. Brutally. No mercy. Her storyline was getting repetitive and critics had started bashing her in reviews. The viewers, however, were split. You either loved her or you hated her. All or nothing.  

A part of me feels like I never got to say a proper goodbye. I abandoned her on New Year's Day. Crusted curls and flecks of mascara scattered across her chapped cheeks. A red dress crumpled in the corner of her room. One heel here, another heel there. A beating headache and pounding heart. I think her last drink was a tequila shot. Or a vodka Red Bull. She can't remember and neither can I. It doesn't matter. It was in that morning we parted ways. A lover so sick. A breakup finally came to fruition after months of festering. I loved her and I hated her. I resented her. I envied her. I miss her. I never really knew her