Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

I can’t remember anything, I remember telling the soft-eyed owner about being lonely, about feeling so very sad. The record store with the two short aisles bursting with old British magazines, browning around the edges, and old records slipped into thick plastic. I feel them between fingers that shake a little now, the ends chewed and torn and the brightest pink, striped, lashed with red. I feel at home; I can touch it. The dust slips inside the small areas of exposed skin and I smear it in my broken hair and I’m here and I don’t feel like drinking or diving or dying or going somewhere else. I can see straight, briefly.

Those seconds, those minutes, are not the seconds and minutes that make up the hours that make up my days. I wander from place to place, drink to drink, until the grey becomes black and I’m swallowed and get home God knows how and every morning when I wake up, I’m always surprised, sometimes crestfallen, to have been spat out again, tender and bruised and somehow a little less than when I was sucked up.

But at night, it’s the coat I wear, tugged around me, that I hate taking off, refuse to. It comes with me everywhere. It becomes my skin. My blood, my hair, my teeth, my touch, my taste.

Within weeks, I have a list of bars I’d rather not visit, some that I simply can’t from sheer embarrassment and shame. The number of blocks I have to walk to get a drink in safety, with dignity, growing alongside it. There’s too much chance of recognition, specifically things I don’t want to be recognised for.

On the good nights, I lose things: my favourite faux fur coat, my red leather gloves, my passport, my bank card, my phone. On the bad nights, I lose more: chunks of my memory, all the feeling in my hands and toes, my loosening hold on my sanity.

On the nights in between, I fight with the bartender about the jukebox (‘Why did you fucking skip New Order? Give me my five dollars back!’). I climb on the hood of a parked car, knees flinching, fighting against the cold, hard metal. Lying on my back, looking at the sky with drunken terror. I let a man whose face never comes into focus kiss me badly against the jukebox as The Smiths play, his hands pulling my mascara and eyeliner down my face in black stripes, tyre tracks from the hit and run. On those nights, my eyes are ringed, hollow, sunk in black; the bright red of my lipstick is smeared up to where my cheekbone hits my eye socket. My reflection is that of a stranger. A clown.

And on the very bad nights, the worst ones, there’s mess to be cleared up the next day. A mind to be patched up, a body to be fixed, a memory to be erased, if it was ever captured in the first place. A scientist once told me that when you reach a certain level of drunkenness, your brain stops recording events. So, the next morning, what you think has been forgotten, what you desperately try to retrieve, simply isn’t there, never has been, never will be. I cling to this in the moments that I rummage for drunken memories in the wreckage of my nights, my days. They don’t exist. And in those moments, I reason, neither do I.

I like drinking. Very much. Or rather, I like what drinking does to me. I like feeling altered. Very much. I like feeling the mundanity and misery of normality dissolve under my tongue. The anxiety that balls my fists, locks my shoulders, fixes my grin disappears. My body loosens, my mind softens, clouds drift in and the release feels like escape.

The mornings are impossible. Every morning is impossible. The ritual cripples me. Wake up, panic, feel guilty and/or ashamed, vomit, shower, vomit (sometimes in the shower), dress, paint my face, pour drops in my eyes to dissolve away the lightning streaks and shoots of red.

Weekends are the worst; my mornings, days, free of the commitment to be somewhere, to be somebody. I never, ever dare make any plans for a Saturday or Sunday; I know that I will likely be unconscious until the afternoon. The freedom means I drink longer, more heavily, with even more enthusiasm than usual. I wake up and vomit – the only part of my weekday routine that I carry over – before taking to the couch where I sleep, eat delivery food, vomit some more and watch TV until it’s time to do it all again. This isn’t the consequence of nights of fun and abandon: I’m usually alone – definitely by the end of the night if not at the start. I don’t need company to drink and my drinking means that many people don’t want to be in my company. Which works out well all round.

I become obsessed with booze: when can I start drinking, what will happen when that half-full bottle is emptied, why has no one ordered another yet, can I order another drink yet? I start to sneak by the bar at any moments that present themselves – shots of liquor swallowed at gigs and restaurants when I’m on my way back from the toilet. At bars when they go out for a smoke. I deliberately don’t keep track of my drinks and really hope that no one else does either. There is no greater relief than the change of a bartender shift: the clean slate that comes with a paid bar bill and a pair of eyes that hasn’t seen your sliding disposition.

But the more I drink, these people, wherever I am, could be my people. This could be my home. I could be anywhere. I could be comfortable. I could even be happy. At some point, I stop experiencing the night in real time. It becomes a series of memories that I’ll revisit or abandon