Have I turned any other direction but to sit with my pain?
No saint here, bound and praying. I couldn’t quit
all the vices, they were many,
without God’s quiet stillness
ushered in.
A moment of need and prostrate
humbled, obviously being a fallen down drunk,
I opened.
In later years, when life wasn’t still, was in fact full of shit and heartache and disappointment
then, I found myself mostly still
hating Me. Still, considering fondly the
afternoon Gin & Tonic, sipped slow. Then,
watching the languorous pouring of a glass of wine, everywhere.
I feel the accustomed
pang, insidious and stealthy pocketing my sober reassurance.
Still, open but with stone hard veins, I’m pulsing envy
hating them.
Then scribbled in the margins of a long forgotten book
I had asked –Do I have a death wish?
Of course I did.
The difference between the happy and the depressed is desire
to be alive,
or else every day wanting out.
Back up a year, no make that five years this summer to that fractured moment
when God spoke finally into my bleary drunken
Impasse.
Desire, to be Holy, ever holy or just a bit, less Me. That day becoming
an ex-drinker,
changed by my choice.
Grief and self-absorbed fear, growing like mold on bread left too long
I stank, rancid.
Longing for, but unable to will the power
within,
for peace, love, pardon, faith, hope, joy and light.
All was dark, even sober
unable to pray, not
believing the modulation of my own voice
to be heard by God—with much more important things to concern wtih—I clung
to misery,
hatred,
conflict,
doubt,
despair,
sadness
even as darkness was constant—
All the reasons I drank
stayed on in sobriety.
I thought I was dying to self but I was merely dying
stone sober, amidst my stench, self-loathing and judgment.
At that time sober wasn’t working
for me.
4 thoughts on “All is Grace, Part One: the Story of Sober Me”