A Night Spent In Los Angeles

You drink alone again. You’ve been doing this now. You curl up in your bathtub with a bottle of wine and drink the whole thing before you realize you have to go to AA. You’re not an alcoholic, but you need court-mandated therapy and it was this or shell out for a therapist, which your parents won’t do, since they have decided they are cutting you off.

You wish you lived in a city where no one drives. If you lived in New York instead of LA, you wouldn’t have this DUI and you wouldn’t have AA, and you wouldn’t be drinking your worries away. You’d be free of depressing acronyms. You’d probably be happy.

The DUI isn’t a big deal or anything, it’s like a rite of passage out here. What else are you going to do, cab it both ways? For a city of skinny people, Los Angeles is so fucking wide.

Or, you think, you could stop drinking. You probably should stop drinking. You think this, and you know for a fact you won’t stop drinking.

“Hi, I’m Blah, and I’m an alcoholic,” says whoever, doesn’t matter. You hate this shit. You can’t say you are anything, because you’re pretty sure you’re not. You’re pretty sure. You’d know by now if you were, right?

But they all look at you like you are in denial because you sit there quietly the whole time. Drunk.

You walk home to the apartment you can’t afford. You open another bottle and whisper as you are doing it, “This is a bad idea.” The cork pops with your dexterous maneuvering of a tricky half-broken opener, and the pop sound triggers some instinctual response like Pavlov’s dog.

You check your email on your MacBook. You keep it exactly at 53 so you know you have a lot of messages when it goes above 60. It is at 62. You read all of them and reply to none of them. You can’t talk to humans. Humans are the worst.

Your mother has sent you job links to jobs you will never get. Your ex-boyfriend from college has sent you a link to his band’s new album. You know there are songs on it that are about you, and you don’t want to hear them, because you know he will have written you as the villain.

The boy you most recently dated is a filmmaker, and he has sent you a very polite, cold email about a project you were working on together before you broke up. You wonder if he’ll make it shit just to fuck with you. You wonder how many people count you the villain of their life.

You go to the mirror to brush your teeth. You are proud for doing this. You don’t always do this. You have been trying now that you know your parents won’t be covering dental.

You look at yourself and make a face and say, “Woof.”

You think, I need to get my life together. You think, this is the last night I’m doing this shit, I can’t go on like this. I need to reach out to people, and open up, and admit that I need help.

You crawl into your bed and cuddle the covers and watch everything swim. You stretch out your legs and realize how much you need being alone. You are addicted to being alone.

You wonder if you will ever be able to break down the walls fortifying your heart.