The Beginning

I always wanted to write a book, but felt I could only do so drunk because that was the only time thoughts ran freely through my words.  This piece is an accomplishment of my sobriety.  I began this writing as a love story and it has evolved into the story of my sobriety.  The framework of my story is written with a drunken mind.  I am now filling in the pieces and providing an ending of hope.

In a bit, I will be drinking.  I will because it has become part of every relationship in my life.  My relationship with alcohol started as a casual fling allowing me to maintain other relationships, even strengthened the bond between myself and the boy I thought I would marry.  This fling intensified into a reckless love affair that turned horrifyingly dangerous.  In my mind, alcohol took away certain things and allowed me to feel free.  Vodka was my solution and my vice to escape.  Looking at who I really am, the underlying fears that prevent me from being my true self, are problems.  These problems seem small day to day until Vodka no longer provides that escape and I am left with myself.

I choose to start my story in the summer of 2006.  In the summer of 2006, I was 28 years old.  I was one of those girls that felt value by my physical appearance because what was going on inside of me was a growth of not feeling good enough.  I felt special when wearing something attractive, flaunting my figure with a little bit of class.  I liked the attention that the way I looked drew without having to say a word.  People seemed to like me, or notice me, when I looked pretty.  People, mostly men, liked me without me having to say a word.  Sad to say, but this works for many girls in feeling good enough on a day to day basis.

That summer, I was single and having fun with two of my great loves in life: alcohol and being validated by physical beauty.  They both gave me what I needed.  The alcohol, courage and confidence that did not exist within myself or of myself.  This courage and confidence I once had as a child, was now smothered, drowned, and dead by the time I was in my twenties.   The validation of beauty was a gateway for alcohol and an adequate tool in achieving the attention of men.  This worked for me for about five years.  I was so far from feeling true, longing to feel special.  I lost myself in dysfunction, all the while convincing myself it was everything I wanted because it looked like what everyone else had.  I have written this memoir of sorts over and over again.  Some of it is written drunk, some is written by my "ism" stemming from alcohol abuse and the aftermath of being sober, and hopefully the best parts, with my sober self, well-balanced and sensible.

The beginning of my dysfunction likely started in childhood.  I really don't know.  I do know  that any rules my parents and grandparents instilled in me started to gradually drift from me when I became part of relationship with someone just as damaged and sick as myself; the root was different but the plant was the same.  His name was Dan.  He was a summer love that turned into a tangled web of circumstances, events, obstacles, and choices... life stuff.  That summer I drank a lot.  I was teacher and had summers of freedom.  I loved, still love, being home.  Most of that summer I spent in the area I grew up in, close to my mother and close to my good friends.

Dan was an Iraqi veteran.  He was deployed right after 911 and truly fought for our country being army infantry.  This in 2001.  He returned shortly after his deployment because of injuries incurred.  We met in 2006 and parted ways in 2011.  I feel the dates are important because even after 5 years, after 10 years, he still had emotional problems from his experiences serving.

That summer, even before our meeting, we both drank, heavily.  The love we experienced was the kind of love and intensity of emotion that I now feel only two alcoholics experience.  It was a love story of a horribly insecure girl feeling validated by a war hero.  At one time when I sat down and wrote about the love I had for this war hero, I thought I was experiencing this great love story... the ones in the war movies with the kind of love that was tragic and exciting.  Now it is just a story about a disease, causing my life to fall to pieces, and he is but a part.  Before this revision, I wrote, "This glass of wine is now gone.  Another."  I choose not to disclose what words I have written as a drunk and what has been written as an alcoholic in recovery.  For whatever reason, I wish to validate my feelings as a drunk.  I suppose because feelings the were the beginning of this mass that has caused much distress to myself and my fellows.  My drunk mind is part of my truth.  For me to accurately portray my alcoholic brain, in the way I am sure shrinks would love to dissect, is to know both a sober and drunken mind.

I met Dan at a country bar.  Classy.  I noticed him notice me.  This is a thrill I experienced often and it gave me a high.  It made me feel special.  I was there with my best friend at the time.  She noticed him notice me as well.  It's the dance many of us play in our twenties.  I didn't typically pay for my own drinks after the first couple.  Tommy came over to talk to me after someone bought me a beer that was sitting at the bar.  I knew I had him hooked, yet was still terribly insecure and my feelings would be all over the place.  I didn't know how to act.  I didn't know what he was thinking.  It was loud and I have this little voice which allowed him to move closer to me.  The more I drank, the more I felt comfortable in the situation... all the time wanting him to like me based on the very little he knew of me.  I wanted to paint the picture of who I thought he wanted me to be.  What I was probably wasn't good enough.

I remember leaving with him and my best friend that night because we weren't ready for the night to end.  The three of us, all drunk, climb into my best friend's car.  She drives us to her home, where my vehicle is located and we enter her home and act like fools.

The next day, I would barely remember what we talked about because my thought functioning became impaired over the course of the evening.  I did remember a tattoo on his arm, one I would get to know well during out nights of passionate, lust-filled, all encompassing sex.  The tattoo was a symbol of his time serving in the 101st Airborne Infantry.  It was one of my first questions to him.  I remember asking,
"Did you kill anyone?"  When I wrote this drunk, I wrote about my respect for his service.  Today, I realize I placed this person on a pedestal for what he did as a naïve young man.  Although this was part of him, that experience, it was not his identity nor did it reflect on his integrity and strength in the present day.

That summer should have been just a fun summer love.  That is the way it began.  His neediness and mine found some solace in one another and we fell for one another quickly.  I realize that I will be writing about some painful turns and excrutiating emotions that will be perceived negatively, as they should be.  The intent of my words is to process my own experience and to perhaps be a vessel providing a God sign to someone reading this with a similar experience with war, alcoholism, an eating disorder, low self-esteem, or domestic violence. 

But the beginning of that love, was lovely.  I remember the love as well as the pain and am thankful for both.  It is odd that I can even remember this experience in that light.  I think it is a sign of my own spiritual growth.  I am able to differentiate between the good and bad.  Rather than damning every part of this other person, I can accept that he is sick and at one time his sickness was not as active and we were able to have experiences together that were exciting and meaningful.

I can remember many things fondly, like our first time together as a couple a friend's lake home.  After a day in the hot sun we went back to his mother's home because that was where he was staying since what I now know is a breakdown of sorts since his injuries and adjustments from war.  His bedroom was in the basement and it is here we decided to lay down and watch a movie together, exhausted from the hot July weather at the lake.

We lay on his bed.  Remembering feelings is odd to me.  Feelings associated with memories that one feels intensely create a physical reaction within my body.  It is like yearning, but a bit different because it is a memory.  Perhaps it is because we hold onto our memories and the body acknowledges that we have not yet let go of that memory.  I remember and as I write feel the nervous feeling I had at that time and the way it felt to lay in his arms.  It was a feeling of acceptance that I still look for, yet rarely find because I struggle so with letting go and just being.

In the beginning of my disease, things were fun and emotions ran my life.  The emotions I was experiencing with Dan were intense, exciting, and provocative.   My drinking coupled with this attraction had me hooked, addicted.  I wanted more.  This wanting for more is something I experience frequently, on a daily basis.  Today, it manifests itself differently... more pepsi, more coffee, more meetings, more crochetting, more cheese, more chocolate, more friends, all these little fixes are part of me and how my brain works at different times, but always frequent, always frequent. 

With Dan, these feelings would translate to my body, how  it feels and what it wants.  We kiss.  Much like alcohol and other vices in my life, one is not enough.  I want more of this feeling though all the nerve endings aroused in my eager body.  We begin to touch one another, each touch lingers and leads to the next.  I had a bikini on under my clothing from our day at the lake.  He touches my perked breasts and kisses me, whispers, "are you okay?"  I look in his eyes, which has always felt awkward to me, and nod yes.  He caresses my sun-kissed thigh.  The light touch of his fingertips makes me feel like I may explode.  I want more.  I always want more.  He moves himself above me and I feel him.  This is the more I desire.  He takes off my bikini bottom and kisses my inner thigh before petting my clitoris with his tongue. He stays there, this makes me nervous, but in this moment I want him between my legs giving me more of the feeling I love, as he tastes the part of me that turns hot and wet with lust at the mere thought of his touch.

I say to him, "I don't want to move too fast."  This is truth.  I am afraid, have always been afraid, of being in a relationship.  I knew sex with Dan was more than sex.  We were addicted to one another physically and later I would discover we were addicted to having another person fill avoid we were both feeling.  He stops when he moves his body on top of me.  We decided not to go too far in that moment.  Yet as we begin to kiss once again, to touch again, to smell again, we make love.  He thrusts inside of me, I quietly whimper and moan in ecstacy.  I love having a feeling that is different than I typically feel.  It is a delicious feeling, leaving me wanting more and more of his cock fucking me.  Dan wants me and makes me feel validated, like I'm a real person.  This war hero desires me and which for me to be only his.

The relationship itself was essentially two very sick, needy people.  Two rather attractive people who had gotten along for far too long without really growing up.  Two middle class white kids, with good families, and very few real cares in the world other than themselves, how they looks and how they were perceived by others in their world.  We took cute pictures together and that was a real relationship, looking the part.  It was fun for quite some time, especially that summer.

That summer came to an end, and I headed back to the Kansas City area and resumed my teaching career whilst taking classes towards earning my master's degree in special education.  I was, perhaps still am, immature emotionally.  Immature emotionally, an underdeveloped sense of self, over-sensitive would all be accurate descriptors.