HOME ALONE

Last night my husband was out of town due to travel for his work and I was left home . . . alone.

Many of you can probably appreciate the sweet freedom this allows.  When you live with someone it can be liberating and borderline decadent to have your home all to yourself, especially overnight. My Mom has long exalted the praises of a night spent solo and I wholeheartedly concur. This rarely happens for me and I couldn’t help but giggle at the vast difference in how I spent my evening last night, as opposed to how I may have spent the exact same evening a few years back.

You card-carrying alcoholics KNOW what I’m talking about. YES YOU DO, AND I CAN SEE THE   NAUGHTY GRIN CREEPING ONTO YOUR FACES RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE.

It’s hard to describe, really. We all know what our “single” behavior is like and it’s exactly like that but when you’re a drunk it takes a little bit more of a dark self-destructive turn than one in the direction of healthy self care.  I would love to sit here and tell you that I would use that time to catch up on my feminist and political reading and make myself some sort of wildly colorful salad and apply a charcoal mask while polishing my toenails, but that was never the case.  Not even close.

My nights would always start out innocently enough, with one or two (all right, more like four to six) very crisp martinis and some Gillian Welch on the stereo. Fast forward three hours and I’m blackout drunk; eating a sackful of greasy slider’s while singing “Round and Round” by RATT at the top of my lungs in the living room while Fight Club simultaneously blares from the tv set. Then there would be the inevitable phone-call to my dead friend Ben who always answered and always encouraged me to have yet another stiff drink and we’d be bitchy and judge-y together often until the wee hours of the next morning.  In his defense, he did talk me out of cutting my own bangs for two decades so I owe him solid props for that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this rare ritual unabashedly and really, no one but Ben was the wiser, and that’s exactly the type of thinking that can keep a drunk white-knuckling it for an entire evening in sobriety. NO ONE WOULD BE THE WISER. No one would know if I ran to the liquor store and I could totally get white girl wasted and hide/destroy all the evidence before my husband’s return. This type of dilemma can torture a drunk, certainly, but not this drunk, at least not last night.  One could argue that I would know, yes, me – the actual drunk doing the rationalizing but this is where you’ve forgotten that while not all liars are drunks, ALL drunks are liars and lying to ourselves is our speciality.  Sure I would know. But would I care? No, because we don’t care when we think we are getting away with it.  Childish, I know, but so very accurate, in my case anyway. In fact, I’d even congratulate myself on how mature and responsible I was for saving money and not driving.  Practically a role model and a law-abiding citizen, I was. Blurgh.

But I care, now. I care a lot now.

I guess my pain is too darn close in the rear-view mirror for me to even entertain these types of horrid thoughts, and I’m truly grateful for that. Of course the thought crossed my mind, how could it not, given my years of practice and experience? But the thought was fleeting, and laughable, really.

The truth is that I spent my evening with Cortez, our asshole cat, and we shared some chicken fajitas and Mexican street corn. I scrolled through some social media and flipped through the new Rolling Stone. I turned off all the lights and we bundled up under fluffy blankets and watched the Season 2 finale of Ozark while eating chocolate chip ice cream covered in marshmallow fluff (now my guilty pleasure) and chocolate syrup. I was in bed with said cat listening to my meditation app by 10pm, I shit you not. And you know what?  IT WAS HEAVENLY.

It was simply lovely and I remember everything. I awoke this morning before sunrise and went to my bootcamp instead of waking up to the aftermath of a frat party wondering where all those bruises came from and what are tater tots doing in the bathtub?!?  

What do you do with unexpected time to yourself?  I promise I won’t judge. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing sixteen shots of Fireball and sobbing your way through Steel Magnolias. NOTHING I TELL YOU.