AMY

REJUVENATION

THINGS I REPLACED ALCOHOL WITH IN DRY JANUARY

By: A.G. Sihler

Mostly water. Lots of it. Copious amounts. Just glass after glass after glass. In the basement of a bar where an experimental rock show is happening I drink upwards of five glasses of water. The thirst born of denial is so much more demanding than the thirst born of desire. There is an old guy on drums, an even older guy as the frontman, and a boy who appears to be about 13 on the bass guitar. ‘Isn’t that funny?’ I say to my friend, ‘Yeah’ she says. She’s not legally allowed to drink until the first week of February. She’s already had two beers. She’s nervous about asking the bartender to charge her phone, and I tell her not to be. We eat a bunch of wings someone left abandoned at their table. This makes me nervous, she tells me not to be. When you’re sober you’re more aware of the fact that you have to come up with the things that you say to people.
Long ass movies. I go home straight after work, as opposed to immediately out to the bar. I’ve decided to watch a movie instead. I’m feeling lonely, probably. Probably thinking about how it’d be nice to be around three to eight people. Or maybe just one. I start missing my first boyfriend on the subway ride home and send him a text, how r u? January is cold as shit. I’m wearing jeans over my leggings and a wool skirt over my jeans. My ass has been sweating all day in the overheated chaos of the claustrophobic store I work at. I have a crush on my coworker, but I don't want to sleep with him. Me and the other girls speculate about whether he’s a good kisser and descend into red faced laughter. He has adult acne. Our boss tells us to get back to work. I watch Summer of Sam by Spike Lee because it's two and a half hours long. Movies, boys, it’s all distraction. From work, from whatever. By the time the movie is over I can just go to sleep.
Snacking. I can’t stop buying sour patch kids, Nutella biscuits, peanut butter snickers, Oreo flavored pretzels, etc. Insane kinds of hunger have overtaken me and I have no good reason to deny myself. Tonight it’s honey nut cheerios with half n half. I’m talking to my roommate late into the night. And she keeps saying how she wants a snack, but she isn’t hungry. She wants to eat but she doesn’t want to eat anything. It’s just this empty desire. ‘Maybe that’s just the lack we all have inside of us,’ I say, being a smart-ass or whatever. And she’s all like, ‘yeah maybe,’ but then keeps complaining about wanting to eat nothing. Cookies? No. Tea? No. Cigarette? No. ‘You know actually I take it back I think the hunger is fake and you’ve just been scrolling on your phone for too long,’ I say. This solution she likes, doe-eyed revelation. She shuts her phone off and resolves to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Going on my phone. Scrolling on your phone is great. Total time suck. You don’t notice the hours on a Saturday night passing you by when you’re busy learning about atrocities and antidotes via short form video content. There is this thing that happens when I go on my phone for too long where I get abruptly anxious, and I'm drawn to the mirror in my room where I start picking at my skin. I take a flashlight to my face and squeeze and pinch all this nasty shit out of my pores. In it there are a hundred confined moments of pleasure and release, instantly followed by disgust and dissatisfaction. During this process I usually am struck by the intense desire to masturbate. Even though nothing sexy is happening. After I wash my face the desire goes away and I usually end up just going back on my phone.
Playing. Messing around. Getting juvenile with it. I get into a snowball fight. The snowball fight itself doesn’t prevent me from drinking, but it makes me feel more hopeful about the potential of fun without booze. There’s about sixteen people on either side of the street outside the bar just launching big scoops of ice at each other. None of us are talking really. I miss being 16 really bad all of a sudden. My coworker’s dad was a Cold War spy. No wonder he’s the best at throwing snowballs. I like word association games now. My friend Kat thinks puns are just word associations. Dog. Cage. That’s a pun to her.
Talking about drinking. And also talking about not drinking. When you aren’t drinking at a party or at a bar the easiest thing to discuss is drinking. Why you were doing it. Why you had to stop. Why other people do it. How much it costs. ‘I feel so much better I’ve really gained a lot of clarity,’ I say. Pats on the back all around. Good good good. I smell beer on my friend Becca’s breath and have the urge to put my mouth on hers, not in a kissing related way, but in a nostalgic way. In the way that in three weeks I’ve seemingly grown sentimental for the taste of Miller High Life. It feels like me and beer went through a break-up. ‘But it smells so good!!’ I say. No no no! That’s just the grief talking. The bus ride home feels a lot longer when you can remember every moment of it.
Being self-righteous. I’m drinking pineapple juice mixed with seltzer water and telling everyone I’m going to do the artist’s way. It's twenty-four degrees out but we all go to the backyard of the bar to smoke cigarettes. Everyone is saying how hard it is for them to read a book. How stupid they’ve gotten. I go on and on about all the books I've read in the new year, how not drinking has made me really smart and perfect. I give my friend Sam some advice on getting started, ‘Just really commit to reading on the subway, that's what I did’ and he shrugs it off. Our friend Avery chimes in, ‘You know what I’ve been doing is just leaving a book on the middle of my floor in like a weird obvious place and then when I wake up in the morning I’m all like what’s this book doing here! And then I remember to read.’ Sam likes this solution. People only like some solutions. Usually their favorite is the one where they have to trick themselves. Sometimes dog owners spell out W-A-L-K so their dog doesn’t get excited.
New Friends. I create a new Hinge account. I match with a few artsy ivy league brunette girls who I will tentatively make plans with, but ultimately recoil because you can’t ‘grab drinks’ when you’re sober and you shouldn’t date when you don’t want to fall in love. And anyhow I’m one of the last people I know who has never kissed anybody I met on the internet and now I think I want to keep it that way. We all have something we’re puritanical about. Some people don't have tattoos. Maybe this can be my not having tattoos, I think. Instead, I use the match feature to reconnect with a girl I knew in high school who I haven't spoken to for at least five years, omg hi!! Ur in ny now? I knew that she had moved to Brooklyn recently, but I’ve been waiting for the right excuse to reach out. She was always very beautiful. And kind to me even though I was kind of ugly. I delete the app after me and her make plans.
CoDA. I have a crush on someone in my Codependents Anonymous meeting but I can’t tell you who for the purposes of anonymity. I rush to the meeting after work. There’s a bar in the bottom of the building, and a lot of Americana-adjacent design choices. Star spangled door. A poorly rendered painting of an army-man in the upstairs wood-paneled meeting room. A generic photo of a tree in fall taken from below. The overwhelming scent of Pantene shampoo. These are the things I can tell you. I’m trying to keep my secrets now. Everyone had been telling me to go to an AA meeting if I was interested in sobriety. I didn’t really want to do that so I settled for CoDA instead. Saying, ‘Hi I’m Amy and I’m a Codependent’ felt more doable to me than saying ‘Hi I’m Amy and I’m an Alcoholic.’ I hate the finality of alcoholism. People can ask you to stop drinking forever, but they would never tell you not to fall in love ever again.
God. This one doesn’t need much explanation I guess. And honestly I’m a little tired of writing this. I want a B-E-E-R.