I don't understand
I don't understand what they're talking about in AA half the time. It makes me feel like I don't belong there. Maybe I don't belong there.
I quit drinking when I got pregnant, that shouldn't be any surprise. Actually, I quit drinking before that, when I was gone for a while, out in the desert. There wasn't any alcohol there. I didn't miss it then. I didn't need it.
It was only after what happened when I got back that it was hard to stay quit. Something about that old apartment of mine was an invitation to become numb, if not unconscious. When I couldn't check out of my mind and body, because of Aguacate, I had to feel things instead. Feel things and sometimes throw up. Throw up a lot, but that was the pregnancy as much as anything else. In the end, I couldn't stand it, so I ran, the way I always do, but at least this time not into a bottle. I just went to Montana. Or ended up there, because that was where I stopped when I got tired of driving west.
When I was still in New York, I would sit at a coffee shop across from this place that had AA meetings. I would watch people go inside, and after a while they would come back out. I would make up stories to myself about them, that one is afraid about his mortgage, she can't stop crying at night because she's so lonely, that girl loves watching old movies in the dark when she drinks. It was easy to imagine how they felt when they went to AA. What I didn't understand was why even the saddest one usually looked happier when he left, at least a little bit more light and free than before.
In Montana, I went to my first meeting. In Helena, actually, and maybe someday I will tell that to Aguacate, should she be a girl and grow up to be the sort of girl who appreciates that sort of thing. It was a big meeting on a Sunday night, in a church basement (of course, aren't they all?). I listened to all the things they read and I watched some kid, he couldn't have been more than eighteen, get a coin for staying sober for a year. Everybody clapped and he said something about his life and then he cried.
Maybe I don't understand AA because I can't cry anymore.
Muse: Ynez Castillo
Fandom: Original Character
Word Count: 410ish