Tags

Related Posts

Connect with Hannah

The Science of Sobriety

Posted | 48 comments

I talk about the weather, sometimes. I’m just like everyone else. It’s getting warmer. It will get better soon. The weather, or some other thing.
A lot of times, we turn the things we don’t understand into words, and these words make us think we understand ourselves. We say I love you because it flows off the tongue every time we see each other. It’s much easier than saying:
Sometimes I want to take photos of you when you get out of the bath and then hang them up in every pizza place in the city with forged signatures, so it looks like all you do is eat pizza naked, and it also looks like you are famous. I think it’s half weird and half endearing that the thought of cheese alone disgusts you, yet you love mac & cheese, as if it’s made of something different, and even eat that gross Velveeta stuff. Your skin is so soft, I get chills.

***
Now that I’m sober, I feel like an astronaut, hovering above the world of my brain. There is no gravitational pull, it seems. No signs of life on this planet. I fear that if my feet touch the ground, my oxygen supply will be cut and my skin will turn blue and then I will die. And so I hover; I am hovering. The stratosphere feels like a blanket.
***
I’ve been reading more, at a rate of one book every two days. My reading habits are as indicative of Attention Deficit Disorder as anything else I do. Several books in several genres, chapter by chapter in spurts.
I like living inside of chapters, and reading certain paragraphs until they are memorized in brain tissue. Then I give the books to other people, usually people I like a lot, and most of the time they are returned. I like this passage of paper through hands, so I don’t have a library card or a Kindle.  I rationalize that my book habit doesn’t cost nearly as much as 6 glasses of whiskey a night, or cocaine, or even a shoe fetish. The days have more hours in them now. I’ve been making my own coffee.
***
Insomnia is a very boring and usual problem to have. Boring, because it forces you to experience life in a dragging, blended kind of way, and usual, because every time you tell someone that you’re an insomniac, they will tell you that – lo and behold — they are an insomniac too, and you will believe them until you have sex with them, after which you won’t be able to say “I slept with them,” and will instead have to be vulgar and say “we fucked,” because you didn’t sleep at all and they did all night, not quite snoring as much as breathing in a muffled kind of comfortable way.
***
 Most of the time, when people say that someone lives in “a fantasy world,” they mean that person is delusional about a specific thing. They don’t mean that the person actually inhabits a separate world in their brain, with different cars and roads and people, or maybe none of those things at all.
I live in a fantasy world a lot of the time, and I’m not delusional about a specific thing. Every person in my fantasy world has an illogical desire to stalk me, or to talk favorably about me behind my back. It’s strange that they should spend their entire lives doing this, but it’s all anyone seems to think of doing in my fantasy world and they don’t know enough to mind. 
In the real world, a friend of mine is writing a novel. It’s fiction, but I’m a character in it. A real person doing fake things. My friend gave me the manuscript of the first few chapters to write on with a red pen. Some of the dialogue wasn’t very good. Some of the conversations sounded like this:
Character 1: You are so great because you are like this.
Character 2: But you are so great because you aren’t like this.
Character 1: Don’t be sad.
Character 2: Don’t be sad either.
I wrote the above dialogue in the margin with a blue pen. I hoped that the pen was acceptable, since the friend had specifically stated the word “red.” I wrote, “ please, stop doing this.” What I didn’t tell my friend is that the bad dialogue in the novel sounded like the way people talk in my fantasy world.
***
I recently had an interview at a grad school and the director asked me why I wanted to write. I said I didn’t want to write. I just write, and I don’t have much of a choice in the matter. I couldn’t stop writing any better than I could try to stop eating (I didn’t mention that I try to stop eating at least once every day and always fail miserably), so I might as well try to get better at it, or at least do something interesting with it, because what else is there to do?
Surprisingly, I got into the grad school.
***
Most people are uncomfortable with most things. It’s a fact, I just don’t know how to cite it. I am no exception, even though I am comfortable with things a lot of people are uncomfortable with, like attending organized orgies, and watching humans get dissected in the name of science. Every time my cell phone rings, my lungs collapse and butterflies smack against the walls of my stomach so hard that they must be on a suicide mission.
A lot of times, when you are talking to someone, you can say “It’s ok,” and it won’t seem irrelevant.
***
I want to buy a dress just for you. Even if we just twiddle our thumbs when we meet. I created the dress and put it on in my mind. It is black with white polka dots and has no sleeves. It is tight around my breasts and hugs my ribcage, but the skirt part of it is full and poofy. It makes me think of dancing while tossing my hair back and laughing.
When I wear the dress in my mind, I also wear pearl earrings, red stilettos, red lipstick and black fishnets. These things are for me, but the dress is only for you. If things go well, we will have the kind of conversation where both lips and eyes are talking at once. If things go well, you will take off the dress and I will tell you that I wore it just for you as I stand before you, naked.
***
My first workshop class in undergrad was for poetry. On the first day, the professor went up the aisles and had us each explain our “poetic process.” I said that I never once sat down with intention to write a poem (“now I will write a poem!”). I didn’t know how to do that, I said, so hopefully I wouldn’t fail the class as a result.
I said I had no control of when a poem would form so I just try to keep a notebook with me at all times, or at least a pen so that I can scribble lines on my wrist or a napkin or the inside cover of a novel or those recyclable sleeves that keep coffee warm.
I said that sometimes I’d just write a line, but usually the whole poem at once, and I didn’t know how to edit, and it kind of drove me crazy because these poems had no regard for my schedule and sometimes became a nuisance, popping up at inopportune moments, like seconds before an orgasm.
“So, basically, you are crazy,” the professor said, and I immediately liked him in a strong way. He later told me that Bukowski wasn’t a poet and that my poems made him want to smoke cigarettes.
Halfway through the semester, I was engaged with a ring and everything, and he told me I shouldn’t get married, and not just because I was too young. I only ached for him in retrospect. I didn’t acknowledge much aching while I was engaged. But you can’t regret things that would have been wrong to do. Or you can, but it doesn’t make them right.