Road trip

Thirty-eight years

Today I celebrate 38 years of sobriety. I got sober when I was 22 years old. I started drinking in middle school. I’ve never had a social drink in my life. Why have a glass of wine when you can have the whole bottle? Or two? I know to my innermost core that I was not born with an off switch.

I am so grateful for the life I have today and for being sober. When my parents dropped me off at the treatment center, I had no idea what sobriety meant. I had no idea that what seemed like the worst day of my life was actually the beginning of a new life.

This week’s poem is a prose poem about a road trip I took with my dad about two years before I got sober. I was about two or three weeks into my sophomore year at Arizona State University and had just dropped out of school.¹

Road Trip

I had just turned twenty the day before. It was September, still hot, and my father and I were driving my car—a mustard-yellow Toyota Corolla—from Tempe to Dallas, south along Highway 10 through New Mexico, passing small towns connected one to the other by telephone wires and electric lines strung between poles marking the road we drove. It felt like the end of everything.

I had just dropped out of school. I had disappeared on Labor Day, after three days of partying, and driven to California with a guy I’d just met. We wanted to go to the beach. My roommates called my parents when I didn’t come home. I arrived back in Tempe before my dad. This was my choice: home to my parents, a therapist they’d already lined up. Telephone poles and wires strung from one to the other, the sun baking the shame in, home to the room I grew up in at the end of the road through West Texas.

I wouldn’t stop drinking then. I’d still go off and not tell anyone. This was just a pause: two days across the desert into the low plains and farmland of North Texas, sitting next to my father whose relief and disappointment hung heavy in the car, like the heat wavering above the asphalt road.

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Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing to my Substack and letting me send you these reflections and poems once a week. And to those of you who have been walking this sobriety path with me—you know who you are—thank you, thank you, thank you.

And if any of you want to talk about sobriety, I’m happy to talk privately. Just send me a message.

I’d also like to recommend

The World We Are

by

Margaret Ann Silver

. She’s a poet and she writes beautiful poetry about life just as it is, messy and wonderful.

1. “Road Trip” was originally published in Eclectia, Oct./Nov. 2017.