#10. Drowning

Sleep wouldn't come. Sleep evaded me like a solar eclipse when I had waited my whole life to watch the shadow pass. I always seemed to miss it, but not by much. I wasn't above medication to help, I wasn't above anything to help. There is a lot of danger in desperation.
I wanted to escape. On one hand I wanted everything the same. Untouched and stagnate. I wanted to maintain what I had. But the realization sizzled like fat on a frying pan, popping and sputtering into my eyes. Nothing was the same. Nothing would ever be the same.
 On the other hand, I wanted to rip everything apart and leave it utterly and completely destroyed. I wanted to ravage everything I had ever loved and obliterate it beyond recognition. Everything was grey now where vivid color had once been. The sun didn't shine, it simply was a variation on the gray scale that happened to be slightly lighter than the black that encompassed me. Depression doesn't begin to touch what I was. It doesn't explain the darkness. Suicide never did cross my mind. I knew I couldn't put my baby boy through losing us both, although I knew in my heart of hearts that he already had. I wasn't the same mommy anymore. I was a shell. A vacated paradise with nothing left but bitter sand and dead withered plants. Only shapeless forms remained where life once flourished. I saw it in myself. I did my best to hide it from the onlookers. It's hard to explain my thought process here, especially while I'm laying it all out.
I relate it to drowning. For over two years, I was drowning. During that time, there were periods of destitute thoughts and fleeting death in the midst of my lungs collapsing and my heart not beating. I was force fed oxygen in short bursts that only resembled my youngest son Weston, and his need for a mother. My body lay motionless at the bottom of the depths, unwilling to move in order to prevent making waves. I refused to make anyone else's swim for survival more difficult. It wasn't until recently I got my first breath of air. After breathing in all of the grief into my heart, mind, and soul....all that's left is to cough hard, and spew it out. So....this is emotional spewing.
During the darkest days, which is the better part of the first year, I sought any and all comfort. There wasn't much. Most days, there wasn't any.
I was a robot moving through motions. 
Alcohol called to me, like a numbing agent being dangled over an open wound but never drizzled. I had toggled the idea in my mind, but it struck a cord as an option. I'm terrified now by how driven I was to attempt that weak and senseless path. Desperation.
Some sweet people, with good intentions, invited me to a concert in late July. Suffocated by the walls that closed in on me, I agreed to go. Kenneth (My children's father) was not interested in going, but had agreed to me tagging along.
And so came the alcohol. Lots of it as the people I recognized from the viewing, who had become dear to me filed into the room where I stood. They had raised a tremendous amount of money for my family and I and had taken this opportunity to present it to me, and share their thoughts. I was moved beyond tears. They were friends of my brother's and had never met me before. Never. Yet here they were, standing in a circle showing me flawless love. It was a rare shot of comfort I absorbed quickly like a junkie shooting heroine. It was enough to carry me through one more day. And that's how I lived.....one day at a time. One second at a time really.
We toasted the moment, we toasted his life.
I began to drink.
Whipped vodka and orange soda. Beer. I tried my hardest to be in the moment. I was doing well. Uncle Kraker took the stage and began to sing, the world began to spin. At this point, I had lost a lot of weight from the stress, and not eating. I have always been a light weight but I was beyond schnockered by the time the music started. The world spun, I sat down. The world spun harder, I laid down. The rest is a pathetic array of prying my eyes open to blue denim, loud music, and my face in my own vomit. My brother held my hair while I puked. On myself. And then I puked more, on him. I puked so hard I thought I'd vacuumed my shoes through my legs and out my gullet. And I was crying. Non-stop. Unable to gain the control I worked so hard to maintain. This wasn't numb. This was raw and horrible. I felt more trapped in the loss of control than I felt in my mechanical world of robot movements. I woke up in the same house we started, with someone else's false eyelashes stuck to my cheek, and a hang over that paled the worst case of typhoid fever, food poisoning, and the walk of shame combined in a cute little package, with a bow on top. What a mess.
I sat on the stairs to take them one at a time on my hind end, scooting slowly so as not to lose what little contents might have been in my stomach from actually swallowing a little spit in the night. It was bile, I could feel it burning my esophagus. Someone was cleaning down stairs.......Damn them. The smell of the cleaning agent sent me bounding to the bathroom to purge my weak stomach once again. I couldn't stand the smell of alcohol for weeks.........I ruled that out, quickly, as a means to survival.
In a later discussion with my father he made the profound comment.......
"Drinking is for happy people."

I couldn't agree more, and am very very careful about my consumption. The loss of control is unacceptable. I blame no one for my actions, I begged for it. I needed it. Had I not gone too far, I might have meddled in it for longer, and drawn out the hurt. It was one night......one night that was a lesson in humility and rage. A lesson I'll never forget.