201 Days Sober
Back in February, when I was a couple weeks into rehab, a New York band called Wild Pink released their self-titled debut LP. For the life of me I can’t remember how I even discovered it, but on Thursday night I saw them play a show at a small club here in DC. After their set I gathered my courage to find the lead singer and tell him how much their album meant to me. That I listened to it a lot walking back and forth to the clinic downtown in the cold, memorizing every note and lyric. That I was over 6 months sober now and feeling really good. I’ve puzzled over this, and there’s no real rhyme or reason to why this album mattered so much to me when it did (aside from it being excellent), but sometimes something finds you at the right moment.
I’m 201 days sober today — 201 days without alcohol or painkillers or sleeping pills. And I do feel really good. I feel happy to wake up early in the morning not hungover. I feel happy to go to bed each night fully conscious and looking forward to the next day.
The farm I work at (the photo above is some of the produce we grew along with a sister farm in Pennsylvania) is on a two-week summer break, so now I just have shifts alone in the early mornings and evenings watering everything a few hours at a time. It’s peaceful and meditative. It feels good to nurture something and keep it alive. While I water I can harvest and take home whatever veggies and fruit and flowers I can find. It’s ridiculous how happy this makes me.
The week began with a solar eclipse. I watched it in a park near my apartment with several dozen strangers. We ranged in age from very young children to the elderly but we all acted like kids, swapping different homemade tools we’d made to watch the eclipse safely back and forth, pointing out strange shadow patterns to each other. It was a rare and joyous thing to all behold something so unique and magnificent together, even for a short amount of time.
So I’m 201 days sober and I still have urges to drink and take pills, but with each day they’re fewer and further between. Tomorrow I’ll wake up at dawn and walk down to the farm and water everything in the pre-rush-hour peace and quiet of Washington, DC, eating delicious cherry tomatoes as I go. Such a simple thing. And, I’m understanding more and more, a pretty magical thing, too.
