A Not So Subtle Reminder

Recall and reclaim the same passion for what you're doing that you felt when it was new.


Day 70


“Oh shit!” I thought as I rolled over in bed. I remembered I had got out of bed yesterday and I felt pretty good. And then it came crashing in. I drank the night before. Shit! Shit! Shit! Why???? I couldn’t remember. Still it couldn’t have been that bad or I wouldn’t feel as good as I did. I went out to the kitchen, the cap’n was already up. He gave me one of those old funny looks. The kind I used to dread. The kind I didn’t get any more. The kind I thought I’d never see again.

“What did I do?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“You don’t want to know,” the cap’n said.

“Tell me,” I pleaded, already sick at heart. “It’s worse not knowing and imagining the worst.”

The cap’n left the kitchen and came back with the black dress I had been wearing the night before. The smell of ammonia wafted up from the crushed material.

“I pissed myself?” I asked, mortified and so shamed.

How could I have let this happen again?

And now I lay there cringing in the dark, wanting to bawl. I hear a snore from the lump beside me. I sit up and look around. I’m home in my cabin on the mountain. I’ve been in hotel rooms for the last two nights. Just plain old hotel rooms with a king size bed, a microwave, and a small refrigerator. No kitchen, not even a kitchenette in sight.

“Thank God,” I whisper in the dark. “It was a dream.”

In the midst of mourning my traditional bottle or two or three of champagne that I’ve celebrated every holiday with for the last 20+years, I had this dream. I admit, I was considering that “special occasion” excuse and talking myself into just one. But I knew one wouldn’t be enough and shortly every day would become a “special occasion”, I just needed this dream to remind me. Of the shame. Of the heartbreak. Of the fear.

So today I’m out there just doing my best to conjure up something sparkly and bubbly just like yours truly plans to be on Thanksgiving Day and, thankfully, just like me it will be alcohol free. I’m taking suggestions. Someone on one of the boards suggested Ariel’s NA Champagne but I doubt I’ll be able to find that in my lovely little mountain village. They also suggested a virgin cosmo, I might have to shake that up.