When I [was] drunk, all my bad ideas sound[ed] amazing
But now I’m sober, I’m creatively constipated.
Let’s pick up right where we left off,
Except minus the whole booze part
Because when I’m drunk, all my ideas sound amazing.
Sobriety so far has been creative constipation.
But I can change that
Because I’m a fucking survivor, and a hero, goddamn it.
My first time to Deam Wilderness was the day after a downpour,
Hiking on swampy mud,
Fought because numbnuts-boyfriend at the time wanted to go off trail.
Took hours and hours to get
Down to the sandy driftwood beach
To the blue blue blue lake
Under a blue-as-can-possibly-be sky
And under-a-million-stars contentedness that night
Warm muck underfoot, naked
Silence distilled into my soul
Mostly, except for that moron there, being negative.
That summer was a bender, and I was ready to die.
You remember: “Does anything matter?”
Drove to the National Forest drunk at midnight
I was in a bikini & hiking boots w bug spray, plastic handle of gin, sleeping bag, 8 pk hotdogs, 64 pk Crayola® crayons (w built-in sharpener), uncoiled wire coat hanger, pad of colored construction paper, Bass® water shoes, and a floral bed sheet, all stuffed in my rucksack
With a gallon H2O & 4 of a 6 pk warm Miller Lite & a flashlight in hand
Hiked down into the forest,
The trees watching me drunkenly stumble down the trail,
Walked fast, made it 90% of the way to the beach by 4 a.m., when I was ready to collapse,
Set up “camp”: laid out my sleeping bag on a pile of leaves next to the trail
Created a campfire with lighter fluid & cooked three hotdogs skewered onto a coat hanger & took pulls off the handle & zipped myself up in my bag like a mummy & passed out.
I woke up to a family walking by on the trail, pretending I was invisible
Or maybe they just didn’t see me.
I wouldn’t want to see me.
Hiked down to the driftwood beach after packing up,
The whole time chasing the contents of the handle with caffeinated water,
Found the best camp site, right on the beach.
Wrote some goodbye letters in crayon on the paper,
Tied the bed sheet around a sturdy tree branch
Into some dejected form of a slipknot
Drinking & thinking about nothing much,
Just knowing I was ready to not-do this pointless, depressing, solitary confinement-style life thing anymore.
Went for one last swim.
Goddamn the water was so blue, warm, and the sky was so perfectly blue. Not a cloud in sight. The lake was so peaceful—I swam on my back. Alone, I played—doing pretend water aerobics, pretending I was an astronaut, talking out loud about nonsense to myself.
I was still & still in the water, joyous, completely oblivious to the fact that I had, less than an hour prior, been ready to go & die… completely oblivious to the impermanence of everything, especially emotional states.
Shuffling through the water, sideways, doing some kind of showtunes song & dance thing,
I came upon a raft, and saw another camp up on a sandmound.
Yelled up, “Hello!”
The campers yelled back that I should come up to the shore and drink all their beer.
One of the girls braided my hair, and all of them were instantly my “friends”.
But always all-too-self-revealing Jess,
drunkenly thought
it would be a grand idea to build closeness & intimacy w some strangers I just met
by showing them
my camp.
The ones in white coats are doctors.
The ones in red shirts are nurses.
The ones in green scrubs—nurses’ servants.
The ones in teal scrubs, with no shoes (slipper socks), fucked up hair & teeth, gnarly dark souls begging through sunken eyes
Are us.
And this is fucking therapy.
Under fluorescent lights, cut off from god
(Can God even hear me through these concrete walls?)
This is therapy?
Puzzles & meds 4x a day & groups & “art class” & VHS movies
Is therapy.
In this experience is contained its opposite:
In drunkenness is sobriety
In the looney bin is a group of sane people
In the forest is a hospital
In the bitterness of being ripped from the hospital is the gratitude I’m still alive
What was the turning point?
What is in this story that I keep telling to myself, to everyone else?
Was the looney bin just the “next step toward life”?
