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Sparkle (0)
“Are you going to call him?” my friend Spencer asked me.
“Do you remember that movie Great Expectations?” I asked him, though I knew the answer. “The movie's tagline is: Let desire be your destiny.”
“I wish they understood,” he said with a sigh, referring to our lovers—all the lovers we'd ever had, and would have. “I wish they could appreciate the meaning of the things we thought when we think about them. I want a lover who would see my words as more than just … words.”
Spencer is a writer, too.
“Because they mean something to us,” he added. “The ink in which they're written is our blood and the paper on which we write them is an extension of our flesh. They're not just words—they're us. I wish those I loved understood that when I wrote I was writing for them.”
I thought about it for a moment.
“You know what all the great odes I have ever written to my lovers have in common?” I asked him. “They've all been read by you. Some of these word monuments never met the men who inspired them. But you—you and my closest friends—have lived and read every word I have ever written. So when I write, that is who I'm writing to—yes, a man is my muse. But you're my tribe, my village, my pack. And I know that no matter how seemingly obscure or cliché the tagline—or the equation—I might employ, you guys will always get it.”
“Wow,” Spencer said after a pause. “That totes makes me think of that scene in Sex and the City where Charlotte says, 'What if we were each others' soul mates and guys could be these people we have fun with?'”
I laughed. “That's totally what crossed my mind when I said that. Exactly. Not to imply lovers are just for fun or disposable, but love, the higher love, the real stuff of thick and thin, sickness and health, sober and relapsed, broke ass and filthy rich, rain or shine? The stuff of the vows? We're already doing that for each other. We don't need a dress and a ceremony to have that. Friends are that.”
We were crying inconsolably by this point. Even though we were alone, we weren't so lonely anymore. And in a way, we knew we would never be. Because we had friends. Friends who had been there long before the great loves and long after.
Spencer has been my friend since college. He has seen me through every significant relationship of my adult life. He has seen me unfold from a woman who wrote because she didn't know what else to do with the words that seemed to constantly pour out of her into a writer in her own right. And he saw me as I made one of the most difficult and significant decisions of my life: to quit drinking.
I will never forget that night. The date no longer makes sense because it's been one day at a time ever since, but I marked it and enough people have asked for me to know that it's almost been four years. I will never forget that night, though. I will never forget waking up at 6:00PM and thinking it was 6:00AM because I no longer had any understanding of time.
I will never forget how I fought with myself to dump that last bottle of vodka into the toilet or how compulsively I washed it afterward, like washing it could somehow cleanse me. I will never forget how I flung myself against my apartment walls, wet and shivering from the washing, crushed by the weight of the realization that I had completely lost control of my life.
Spencer always says I am strong because I've never relapsed. The truth is that I'm not strong. Every morning, I eat the fear of what that one drink will do to me.
I have a little picture—a picture of David Lynch's contribution to the 2000 New York CowParade, which is part of an international public art exhibit in several cities around the world that features fiberglass cows decorated by local artists.
Lynch decapitated his cow, removed its back, added fiber-glass organs, stuck several forks and knives into it and carved EAT MY FEAR on its side. The cow was rejected outright and the AP called Lynch “too gruesome even for New York,” but the cow lives on. Every morning I think of that cow and then I eat my fear for breakfast.
I don't know why it's that cow or how exactly it came to
