Sorry about that. Life happens. There IS a long, heart wrenching drama behind this, and I'm sure I'll recount it in detail at some point, but some of the details are still too painful to revisit. Suffice it to say that I met someone. For a very brief moment it seemed like he could be someone really special. We had a connection, so much so that we exercised a lot of restraint in our physical intimacy.
That restraint went for naught a week later sitting in an HIV clinic in the Village crying hysterically, wondering what it wrong with me. I mean, it's not enough that I have to pick guys who break my heart. I have to find the ones who will kick me in the balls on the way out the door. This guy made a point of hurting me as much as he could when he decided he wasn't into me. It made me question myself, all the progress I've made thus far, my very sanity. It is without doubt the single worst moment in my sobriety to date. I think I came very close to killing myself. At least when I was drinking, blackouts could help me avoid the pain, postpone it for a while. The gifts of sobriety, of course, are that I get to be fully aware for every awful moment in technicolor.
The long and short of it is that I literally cried for four days nonstop. I even cried in my sleep. I shit you not. I would wake up crying, my pillow sopping wet in spots. I had no faith in others, no faith in myself. I wanted to die. I wanted to close my eyes and never feel anything ever again. Relapse was only a threat in that it would have been the chosen means of suicide. I wanted to "Leaving Las Vegas" my way out of this world.
I don't know what happened, what pulled me out.
It helped that my first instinct was to reach out, both to Auden and my sponsor. I told them I was hurting and that I didn't know if I was safe, that it was more about my life than my sobriety. They were there for me as I wept. I don't think I heard more than 10-20% of what either of them said to me (sorry if you're reading this, guys!) but just to know that they were there, just to know that they cared enough to drop everything to be there for me. It made me want to stick around just long enough to see if maybe tomorrow might not hurt as much.
Eventually it did. I just put one foot in front of the other. I went to work. I went to meetings. The thought of him is still painful. The worst and perhaps most shameful aspect of that is that there is still some part of me that wants to see him again, to kiss him and hold him in my arms, pretend none of that awfulness ever happened.
But it did. I'm a little older, wiser and less trusting.
And that's sad.
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