In addition to the almost immediate weight loss, the second thing I noticed about being sober was the anxiety. It’s been 21 years since I’ve had a drink. For years I even steered away from Ny-Quill because I was terrified of becoming again who I had recently stopped being. And while I was haunted by images of Michael Keaton drinking vanilla extract in the movie Clean and Sober, I never went the imitation route until recently and that’s only because the “flavoring” packs more punch than the plant and for way less money. (1)
My sobriety is finally at that age where it can drink. Others would debate me saying I live a life of sobriety as I sometimes use cannabis. With weed however, I have expansive ideas, slack muscles, and fears of the future. With alcohol I had promiscuity, disloyalty, and potentially murderous drunk driving. So whether my lifestyle fits a definition matters less to me than if my life is true.
Anyway, the anxiety. As it’s been two decades since I quit drinking, I’d forgotten much of the phase referred to as “drying out”- as if we’re a forgotten wash cloth at the bottom of a dirty tub. It’s less drying out and more being reborn with angles instead of curves.
It wasn’t until I was in a car wash yesterday that I remembered that initial anxiety of sobriety. It’s one of those jazzy car washes where you stay in the vehicle and relinquish all control to an automated one-tire track as the suds are lit up by a ravey rainbow of colored lights.
Once the suds coat the car, everything in view is shrouded by soap. A nonconsensual cocoon of suds. As my GTI slow-jolted forward in a waterfall of opaque foam under the agency of another, my body was reminded of those first days of sobriety. A constriction of chest and amplification of heart - everything suddenly more intense and colorful but also unsettlingly blind and tight.
The ease of alcohol used to loosen me, and I spent enough of my young years under its warmth that I didn’t realize what a tight screw I was without it. Loosen enough bolts and the whole contraption falls apart. For years I was falling apart. I was notorious for showing my tits in public. Most of my stories would start with the phrase, “So I was sucking this guy off. . .” And I’d spill secrets as often as my drink.
Once I quit drinking, all my screws retightened and with that tightness came an anxiety I never knew I had. Uptight, controlled, busy, overwhelmed, but also - finally - clean and bright. As the suds were rinsed from the glass I started to breathe again. The monstrous slapping storm of the brushes passed over the plateau of my hood. And I was reminded of the days I finally settled into living a carefully wild sober life.
(1) I can’t find that scene so maybe my 13 year old brain made it up or I’m thinking of another movie. Anyone know?
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Not Endnotes, but Body Thoughts I Cut from this Piece
The word consensual also refers to eyes, where they react consensually - together; even if a light is only shown in one eye both pupils will constrict. This doesn’t even happen with nipples. It is a glorious revelation of ocular mechanics
A thought on how well my mouth held my cigarette when my hands were busy pulling my breasts from my dress. . . aren’t some of our major orifices really just hands sans fingers? So that our mouths, assholes and cunts are palms that can grasp and release? The third, fourth, and fifth hands of a female’s body. The people born men have one less hand than women and there’s something grand about that.
"One less hand and an additional boneless finger" sounds like the second line of a poem.
For more on the existential compression -- of mind, mood, and moment -- in a car wash, cf The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke, 1989
Thanks for sharing these insights, Trilety. Especially: "being reborn with angles instead of curves" is very evocative.
(I am always amazed by being drawn through the car wash.)