There’s a place that I think about from time to time.
In certain ways, this place changes a lot. Sometimes it’s a crowded city, sometimes it’s a remote jungle. Sometimes it’s in Greece, sometimes South America, and sometimes the Florida coast (It’s always, for some reason, near water). Sometimes there are other people with me at this place, and at other times I’m completely alone.
Beneath these superficial changes, however, the place always stays basically the same, and I always recognize it when it pops into view, even if it’s in some new and momentarily unrecognizable guise.
This magical place is – as you might already have guessed – the place where I’ll finally be allowed to start drinking again.
I could be wrong, but I have a feeling a lot of ex-drinkers have a place like this in their heads, at least now and then. Mine tends to show up un-announced, and definitely not at the times when, logically, I might expect it to. That is, it won’t necessarily appear at the end of a bad day when I feel particularly overwhelmed by the world (though at times it does). Usually I’ll just be going along about my business, when – bang! – there it is, floating in front of my mind’s eye, looking pretty good indeed.
I, of course, make an appearance in these visions too. I'm usually older than I am now (48? 55? 62? It depends.), and I’m always in a very relaxed state because my financial problems have been, somehow or other, solved for good. Consequently, the world is no longer expecting anything of me. If I wake up late one day, or two days, or sixteen days in a row, it won’t really matter. No one will notice. No one will care.
My financial struggles aren’t, however, the most important thing I’ve left behind in this magical place. When I picture myself there, I picture myself as being in a different chapter of my life from the one I’m in now. One in which all the complex and consuming sobriety issues that have filled my days in recent years are no longer germane. Somehow or other, it no longer matters if I drink or not. It’s just… not an issue.
None of this is really all that illogical. Everybody knows, after all, that life moves in chapters. Many problems I had as a kid or adolescent – problems that seemed so big that the world was going to end because of them – seem laughable to me when I look back at them now. So why shouldn’t this be the case with drinking too? Why shouldn’t the seemingly all-important issue of whether I drink or not become, in time, a non-issue? Why shouldn’t this splendid, balmy place – this spot where the palm fronds are waving just outside the window, where I can do and be just as I want, when I want, even if it involves having a drink or two or five hundred – not someday be a reality?
The answer, it seems to me (and sooner or later I always get around to remembering this when these visions occur) is that my drinking isn’t really a problem. At least, it’s not one like the other problems I have in my life, be they big or small. Problems exist INSIDE one’s life, like pieces of furniture inside a house.
But drinking, for me, doesn’t exist in that way. Rather than a piece of furniture inside my house, it IS my house.
Not in the sense that it's a prison, but rather in the sense that it's part of the ultimate architecture of my life: of who I am at the deepest levels of my identity. My relationship to alcohol -- both as a practicing drinker and, today, as a practicing non-drinker -- relates to who and what I am, and of my journey through life, at the most intimate and ineradicable levels.
Which is why, no matter how good the weather looks in that place that pops into my head from time to time, I know that I don't really want to move there.
Not today, not tomorrow, and -- hopefully -- not ever.