DEAR ALCOHOL,

You made me crazy.

It was not your fault, but mine, for trusting you. For giving you power over me. Even when I was drinking, I sometimes had a moment of clarity when I would say to myself, "people like me shouldn’t drink," people like me who are willing to let go of their own personal power and hand it over to another entity, alcohol.

I seemed to be so ready to give up so much of myself--including my sanity. Since I believed there was nothing inside myself worth much, I looked for something outside myself to fill the void. There was a huge empty space in me, which I tried to fill up with drink. The emptiness went so deep that the hole seemed bottomless. The liquid simply drained through the sandy bottom. There was no filling the void I had. Instead it was a case continually needing to find you, for your momentary fix, Dear Alcohol, to pour you into my emptiness.

Pour and pour more until the insanity set in--then, in that divine state of false truth of "in vino veritas", the insanity would feed on the warm breath of your drink. Then the chemical would transform my state of mind until I became lost to the world and to my sane self. I would fall as if from ten thousand feet from an airplane and tumble and spin, wildly performing the most irrational acts, spurred on by the courage of the liquor. Until after a dizzying and terrifying last few seconds I would die a bone-splattering death where I would crash once again onto the hard truths of reality. With the chilling knowledge that I couldn’t stay high forever, I finally realized, in the death I died each time I drank, that I would be unable to travel any farther away from myself.

Dear Alcohol, I’m guessing that every drunk like me sooner or later either arrives at this conclusion or dies. Having been somewhat close to death, I learned that even death itself couldn’t carry me any farther away from my pain. There was a finite distance I could go and you, alcohol, could carry me there but no farther.

After each drunk I on my own would have to make my own way back to sanity. But this became more and more difficult each time. It seemed I was slipping backwards on a river of alcohol carrying my whole life with me, a weight which held me below the surface of the alcohol I was drowning in.

And though I’m not now in that river I still feel your nasty breath on my neck, oh alcohol, and I do know you want me back and that you would love me to pick up that first drink--a fine and expensive glass of wine. What’ll it be?