Meeka McCallum

This piece originated as a series of mental snapshots. Over time, through slow but consistent work, the space between each snapshot began to fill, creating scenes until finally a full story emerged. It is a story I lived but am still learning, and more is revealed each time I sit down to write. - Meeka McCallum

Sometimes, we have to be silent to speak.

In my dream, I am shackled. My hands and feet are bound and there is something piercing my tongue—a long metal needle that cuts the roof of my mouth when I close it. I have to keep my mouth open as wide as I can, and the pain is unbearable, but I am not alone. Someone else is here, an older sister, but she is also me. I want her help, but can't speak, so I jut my tongue out to her, tears streaming down my face. I am more afraid of the pain that will be caused by its removal than the pain of it remaining. Before I can stop her, she grabs the needle and draws it out of me. The blood tastes metallic in my mouth. Slowly, she moves down to my ankles. A key is in her hand, and she places it in the lock, releasing me. She does the same with my wrists, and I feel naked without my chains. She disappears and I awake into the early morning light, knowing, for the first time, that I am free.

A year later, I find myself sitting in a bar. The dim light retreats like my resolve, into the dark corners of the room. My anxious fingertips gather on the worn rounded edge of the bar, and I am about to fall. I lean in to the warm cavern of my boyfriend's ear, his sandy hair tickling my face, and whisper, “I want to drink.”

His face drops in disbelief, “You sure?” He looks at me, pale eyes filled with concern, and a trace of anticipation, as if a part of him has been waiting for this all along.

“Yeah,” I say, but it sounds like someone else's voice.

“What do you want to drink?” He drawls.

“I don't know.” Hesitant, I whisper out the side of my mouth, “A shot, I guess…can you think of something stronger?” Even before the bartender takes our order, a tingling sensation begins to form inside my belly, working itself through my body and into my mind. By the time she brings the drinks, I am so swept up in the moment—in the danger, the excitement—that every cell in my body is in motion, each jumping like a little bead of water on a frying pan, trying to escape. She sets my glass on the bar. There is nothing between the drink and me. There is no line, no invisible barrier that will keep me safe—only air.

Time becomes elongated until everything inside me grows still: the noise in my head, the rapid beating of my heart, even the noise in the bar becomes muted, as if there were another presence here, listening, watching. It leaks in from the door, from the air and light outside. I feel it come up behind me, entering through my back and settling in. My hands relax on the bar, my back slumps and I sigh internally as a quiet voice inside me says, You don't have to do it.

I push the voice aside, and darkness surrounds me. Everything around me is gone: my boyfriend, the bar, the lights, the music. I am alone except for what sits in front of me—a thick glass of amber liquid: Tequila. I'm just going to smell it. My hand is moving slowly toward it and before I know it, my fingers are closing around the glass. It feels good: solid, comforting. My arm bends, bringing the drink up to my face. The smell is sharp. I am overwhelmed by its familiarity, its closeness. I'll just taste it. The glass on my lips, the wetness on my tongue, touching alcohol—the forbidden liquid—for the first time in nine years.

*

When I woke up that morning, there was nothing that would have led me to believe that only fourteen hours later I would be sitting in a bar with my boyfriend drinking for the first time in three-thousand-two-hundred and ninety-two days.

We met on a blind date the year before, on Avenue A in the East Village, in front of a bakery. It was winter, and a cold wind blew against my biker jacket as I waited for him. I stared at the loaves of fresh bread in the window so that he'd be the first to spot me, but I accidentally looked up just as a figure came hulking around the corner. We looked at each other tentatively, then smiled and stood facing each other awkwardly. Neither of us had been set up before, and neither of us wanted to be there. But after chatting for a few minutes, he suggested we have dinner before coffee, so we crossed the street and ate at a small Sushi bar, then walked the city streets for hours. I wasn't particularly attracted to him, but there was something gentle about his large frame and the sloppy way he carried himself, as if he was only half-present, as if there was something else running along inside of his mind, parallel to our conversation. Later, when I found out he was a musician, I realized it was music. Besides the normal sounds of traffic and voices, he was tuned in to something else—to the random sounds of the street that converged to make something greater, something different, that only he could hear.

On our second date I told him that I was sober, that I had been since I was nineteen years old, and that I couldn't get too serious with someone who drank, even if he only drank socially. I wanted to suspend my jaded views, to believe not in the power of alcohol, but in the innocence that inspired Tim to say that he would quit if we fell in love; and for the first six months, he did. I became his first love, the first woman he was with. But there was something about his naiveté and gentle spirit, the openness in his eyes when he looked at me, allowing his love to pour out, unhindered, that infuriated me. I didn't know what to do with his love: it felt relentless rather than comforting, his arms confining rather than embracing. Even after nine years of sobriety, there was still a piece missing inside of me, hinged to the belief that I was broken and unfixable. Tim saw something else in me, something that I couldn't see in myself. He saw that I was lovable. So I had to make the love go away.

I decided to drive cross-country. Unfortunately, Tim could only come for the first ten days. By the eighth day, a silence stretched between us, as taut as one of the strings on his instruments. The straight Montana highway spread before the tires of my grey Acura, the stereo blasting Tracy Chapman wailing about a woman who was beat down by her man. My voice joins hers, full throttle. Tim's silence seeps towards me, giving weight to the air between us, creeping into my skin, until I turn down the music. “Is something wrong?” I ask, glancing back and forth between him, the approaching pavement in front of us, and the receding pavement behind us. Tim stares ahead. I wait. The only sound is the road.

The music goes back up, but my voice is now hesitant. The joy is gone, and I spot a graveyard on the side of the road. Slowing the car, I turn in.

“We need to talk,” he says, voice tense and cold. Silently we walk a few feet and sit down between two graves. Pine trees border the graveyard and I stare at the reddish-brown pine needles. I want to crawl beneath the trees and close my eyes, feel the soft, prickly padding on my back, and pretend I have not done something terribly wrong. I can feel it in my gut, that I have committed an unconscious crime, as I sit before Tim, trying to avoid his accusing eyes.

“I read your journal.” Guilt, hurt, and fury all mingle in his eyes as he continues, “Last night, you left it in the car and this morning as we were packing up, I read it. How could you? How could you say those things about me? Is that how you really feel?” His eyes begin to well up and I am at a loss for words. I run to the car and grab the journal, thrusting it at him, telling him to show me what he read. What day. He opens it and hands it back to me. The words are scrawled in black ink: I hate him.

My stomach drops and I feel as if my body has abandoned me; mouth moving but no words coming out, as I try to come up with an alternate meaning for those three small words. Finally, I explain that what I hate is his vulnerability and innocence, because mine has been gone for so long. That the world has toughened me up, yet left him soft and pliable.

I tear out the pages of my journal and we make peace. Two days later I drop him off at the airport in Helena and continue on my way. As the road opens up in front of me, the metal that has encased my heart begins to bend, peeling away. It continues to peel as the miles pass beneath me, from Montana to Wyoming, Vancouver to Washington, California to Kansas, until I am back home again.

As my heart was being revealed, Tim's was being covered. By the time I returned to New York six weeks later, his heart was encased and he'd started drinking again. The person I came back to was different than the person I had left. Tim had become jaded during my absence. No longer in love, he was no longer not drinking. Rather than including me in plans with his musician friends, he'd smirk and say I'd better not come because, “we're gonna get loaded.”

When I do join him at gigs, I ask Tim not to drink around me, not wanting him to have something that I cannot. A jealousy, deep and blind, rises up inside of me. I meet him at gigs and watch him between sets, standing with his friends, talking and laughing, casually swirling his drink, throwing his head back, swallowing. I am folding in on myself, sitting on the edge of a cushion, glaring at him. A quick glance at his friends, then a slow amble over to me, “Are you alright?” “Fine,” I turn my head towards the bar, then back again. He walks away. I am a large gray boulder on the edge of a lake, exposed. The only one not drinking, and I am pulling him down.

Now the softness was gone from his eyes when he looked at me. In its place was something unfamiliar. He had removed himself from me, and since then I'd been feeling left out and different: hanging out with `the boys'—musicians in Manhattan—being the only one not drinking. Wishing I could be `normal' and part of society. Drinking/Not drinking had become a wedge between us and I thought, though didn't realize it at the time, that if I could drink, the gap that had been widening would close.

I had left work that April night, almost six months after returning from my trip, wanting to consume alcohol, fantasizing about the bottles of beer and empty wine glasses left on a table after a big party at Fordy's Bar & Grill, where I was a waitress. I lived and worked in Nyack, NY, a small artsy town twenty-five miles northwest of Manhattan, known for its antique stores and eccentric inhabitants.

They sit, couples at tables, sipping wine, smiling. The women hold glasses delicately with long, manicured fingers. The men drink deeply from their thick mugs, beer frothing on their upper lips. Hands, strong and square, move confidently from drink to soft cheek and back again. They are dressed nicely, neat but not fancy. This is a bar-restaurant where I work, serving drinks I never learned the names of, since I quit before being able to legally drink. I scribble down the words and show them to the bartender, hoping he'll be able to interpret. This is not my world—the language and behavior are unfamiliar. I watch them move, speak in soft voices, glance around the room, order drinks without thinking.

I can imagine myself sitting at one of the tables with my boyfriend, laughing with easy gestures, a glass of wine in my hand, waiting for our food. There is no before or after, just a moment of ease between two people, a feeling of fellowship with others. This is a normal American evening; people are sitting all over the country in the same positions, with the same lights hanging over their table, the same drinks in their hand. But I am exiled from their circle, warm hued and wooden; I'm here to serve them a drink, then I'm gone, back into the white-and-black-buttoned world of restaurant kitchens, of little square aprons tied around waists, of orders scrawled on thin paper pads. After work I am clearing empty bottles off tables while the other waitresses sit at the bar, shirts opened, aprons sprawled across counting tables where money is separated into piles of five, ten, twenty, fifty dollar bills. Their conversation is warm, they joke in loud bursts, accompanied by thunks of heavy glasses set down on the bar. They are drinking for free. When I am finished I sit in the back room counting, sipping flat, syrupy soda, slipping out the door.

I walk a block to my car. There is only one streetlight, buzzing off and on, a grayish-orange. My hands, smelling of stale beer, grip the top of my steering wheel. I am not going home. The Palisades Parkway stretches in front of me; the moon shining dull on whitish pavement beckons me towards the city. I feel empty inside my body, as if the metal shell of my car is the only thing holding me in, keeping me from slipping away into my thoughts, which hover like the white, moon-rimmed clouds above me. My hands, arms, face—the skin covering my body—feel cold, pasty. The only warmth a slow burning inside that grows each time I repeat the words: I want to drink.

It rises inside me, this thought, pulsing louder in my head, its beat becoming as frantic and insatiable as the club music filling my car. It expands outward through my body, a high-pitched vibration emitting from the tips of each nerve. I click the radio off. Silence. The rubber bhhurring, the hollow clump-clump of my car speeding down the highway.

In a bar in Greenwich Village, Timothy Lefebvre is waiting.

I park a block away and begin walking until I turn the corner onto Christopher Street. A square sign, painted white, swings above the doorway: Bar 55. The heavy wooden door creaks open, I step down into a warm oasis; it wraps around me like a thick blanket, drawing me in. My boyfriend sits in the corner, hunched in the shadows over his drink. His upright bass leans against a wall on the tiny stage—a full-bodied woman basking in the afterglow. My body—a thin, taut bow—slips onto the stool beside him. I have followed him, over the past year and a half, into dim bars, jazz clubs, velvet-couched lounges; a slow transition from my world to his; from sober parties, scavenger hunts, and full-moon ceremonies to nightlife in the city.

When he goes back on stage, his head lolls back in ecstasy, his eyes close, his sculptured fingers dance deeply over the thick strings. Soft brown shoes tapping, mouth open, head bobbing. I close my eyes, allowing the music to surround me, drumbeat calling upon my heart, begging it to follow, to shed control, embrace its beat. To allow the soft metal brush to splay my thoughts, spreading them away from me, forcing me to lose control. The guitar riffs call to something buried deep inside me, a longing to break free, to step outside my comfort zone, to let the wall confining me crumble and fall. Opening my eyes, I see Tim: tall, curly hair sitting loosely on top of his head; square face, soft features; light, hopeful eyes; slouching shoulders, sloppy gestures: my first drinking boyfriend.

I can't swallow the Tequila. Instead, I push it aside and ask if Tim will order me something else. With one sip, I have crossed the line. I am not about to walk away without knowing what it feels like on the other side. He looks at me oddly, but orders two double shots of Jack Daniels: one for him, one for me. My conscious, sober mind, has shut down, a soundproof wall dropped between it and the part of me sitting at the bar drinking the dark, bitter liquor that is already softening my senses. There is no mode of communication between these two parts, no thought of stopping what I have begun by taking one sip of alcohol. I instantly want more. More. More.

It's four in the morning and the bar is closing. While walking to my car we run into a friend of Tim's, another musician. Marcus Wolff. He is small-boned, with a pathetically determined slant to his chin, and gentle eyes that seem to always be seeking approval and recognition. His wispy brown hair blows in the early morning breeze as we all stand around my car, chatting. My body feels warm and pliable, full of generosity. I want to give him something. Something that will give him strength, that will help him walk—shoulders squared—down the street.

The conversation seems to be waning, so I fumble with the clasp at the back of my neck, removing the chain and holding in my hand a beautiful silver wolf head with black onyx eyes. Staring into its eyes I fall backwards through time, until I am seventeen years old looking at myself in the mirror of a cluttered bathroom in a pizzeria. Drunk and stoned, my eyes stare back at me with a concentrated intensity. I focus all my energy on my third eye, hoping to see beyond my human face, to see what lies behind my pale flesh, what creature I am made of, because I do not feel human. My face wavers for a moment, then steadies. Again it wavers, then begins to shift and blur until I am no longer recognizable. The face in the mirror is aging, cheeks sinking down, eyelids drooping, lines forming until I am staring at an eighty-year-old woman. I want to turn away, to shake off the image, but am unable to move, save for gripping the edge of the sink to keep from falling. Again the face shifts and blurs, but this time, what I see is not human. Its eyes are no longer mine, but have clouded over, changing from brown to a hazy gray; demon eyes, staring at me from centuries away, from a time when the earth was nothing but smoke and fire. I shake my head to clear the image, but before my face returns to me, I glimpse another. A creature that from that night on would become my symbol of strength and independence, of something a bit wild, a part of me that won't go down without a fight.

Interrupting Tim and Marcus' conversation, I say, “I want to give you something.” They both look at me oddly. I hold out the pendant and as he protests, I walk behind Marcus, lift the necklace over his head, and place it on him, closing the clasp. I have relinquished the wolf spirit: it now belongs to him. It is years before I regret giving this gift, as many years as it takes for me to reclaim my own spirit, to get sober again.

We say goodbye and as soon as we get in my car, Tim behind the wheel—he is the more experienced drunk driver, I haven't driven drunk in years—I ask if we can stop to get some beer before heading to his apartment. I rationalize this by telling myself that I will not lose nine years of sobriety for a few shots of Jack Daniels, but really I am being driven by another feeling—the fear of being deprived once I have begun, of being gypped of the full experience of my relapse. The rigidity with which I used to keep alcohol away is transforming into a relentless drive to make sure nothing infringes on my reunion with it. The compulsion has already begun and I want to gather all the alcohol I can possibly consume in one night towards me. I want to hold it close, like a long-lost friend, making sure it doesn't leave, that there's enough to fill me up. I sit in the car, holding the six-pack to my chest as Tim drives. I watch the city pass by, then fall behind us as we cross the Brooklyn Bridge. The person who drove into the city to meet her boyfriend just a few hours before—she's gone. A new, less secure person has emerged. One who is traveling as fast as possible to keep ahead of her thoughts, ahead of her conscience, so that nine years of sobriety won't catch up to her, won't make her stop the new direction her life has just taken.

My eyes open and I am lying on a bathroom floor in Brooklyn. It is the morning after and I am wrapped in an old green comforter, my legs and the excess blanket spilling out onto the living room floor. Tim is sleeping peacefully on his bed in the next room. I am staring up at the ceiling—white cottage-cheese stucco—as the coldness and hardness of the tile seep through the blanket into my back. The gray silence of morning leaks through a wire-meshed skylight, the only sound a muffled thudding of my heart inside my ears. I feel like I am under water, that I have been here for years: the swaying room, the fuzzy edges, the queasy stomach. So this is how it feels. Already something has happened that can never be undone. Tim has opened a door for me but what I thought would bring us together now lies between us.

Gathering the blanket in my hands, I crawl across the floor to the bed and climb up. Tim does not wake, but I lie next to him and listen to him breathing. Mine is shallow, as I fight off panic and disbelief; the reality of what I have done. The line has been crossed, and now there is a tiny hole in my belly, growing with each moment that passes as I lie, cocooned in Tim's comforter, cut off from him, the world, my sober life. Already, I know that I can never go back, that it will never be the same, and if I don't stop drinking, this tiny hole will continue to grow, until it consumes me.