The cool morning air, pungent and tart as a green apple, sneaks up under your fleece jacket and your skin is instantly covered by a thousand goosebumps. The light has shifted announcing the onset of autumn. Nostalgia bleeds into your fragile soul, watercolors tinting parchment paper, a longing for a better time that you really have no recollection of. Fall used to frighten you, before you found medication that cured your depressions, deep and black as tar. Nonetheless, the days growing shorter never cease to remind you that another year is coming to an end, that where you are now has not gotten much better than where you were before. You have tried so hard to improve yourself. You really did assume that if you could simply manage to quit drinking, the rest would just naturally come together. And then, nothing came together at all.

You remember drinking wine like you remember a lover who has left you. You yearn to lay your head down in his arms one more time, to drink one more glass and you know good and well that one moment, one glass will never be enough and you are so terribly alone. Maybe you are not taking on sobriety in the right way. To your surprise, you are not any more self-confident, you don’t feel any stronger. You feel like an inadequate freak of nature and you can’t quite decide if it was your drunkenness that kept you from realizing your freakiness and your inadequacy or if you were closer to normalcy back when there was beautiful chilled Sancerre in your big-ass coffee mug. At least then your were smiling.  Now you are in a permanent state of panic. Your chest is always tight as a drum, your throat constricted. You figure that even your voice has changed as a result of this perpetual anxiety attack.

You loved to write before, the words danced behind your eyelids and you were afraid of losing them so you wrote them on napkins and scraps of paper, in notebooks, on your phone. Now your words don’t flow out so easily. Or maybe you are more coherent now, maybe what seemed profound to you before was just drunken gibberish.