Short Story: I’ll be here in the morning

I could’ve been anywhere and sometimes I feel I’ve been everywhere. It was the summer of my 26th birthday. I felt I had done so much, and other times nothing at all. I was sober for exactly four months and three days. At first, sobriety feels like a punishment. It makes you feel like someone outside the party, constantly looking in. Wishing and longing that you could be like all those who seem to function without substance.

Eventually, that feeling subsides. I began to find peace again. Peace in the quiet, and strangely enough, peace in the mundane. You seemingly begin to feel “okay” again. Content with the humming of your own existence and boredom. You sit in the passing of time. Five-minutes feels heavy, and then it’s gone. An hour feels like a lifetime, and a day feels like an eternity. The last time I felt this way was when I was a boy, back home in Tennessee. I’d sit on the front porch of my great grandmother’s house, while my family members cared for her in her final days. Sometimes, if I sat still enough I could feel my wisdom teeth grow in. I remember watching the sun’s light cross the ground, as it made its entrance in the east and its exit in the west. I was totally content, and infatuated by creating my own sundials with the surroundings I could possess with my sight. If the sun shined on the porch, and blinded me, it was the morning. Once it hit the old oak trees in the backyard, it was right around noon. Once it dropped behind the shed, it was evening. Maybe around 7pm.

The sun always looked the same there because we only visited my great grandmother during the summers. The sundial was thrown off it’s balance when she died in the fall of my 7th grade year at school. The funeral in autumn, the sun seemed to only stay for a short while now.

After that, I did everything I could to distract myself from time.

When I got out of rehab, she was the first person to reach out to me. She picked me up from the inpatient facility they had me at in upstate New York. I couldn’t drive for multiple reasons. They revoked my driver’s license, but that didn’t matter because I hadn’t owned a car in four years. We do funny things to get high.

In Jewish culture, they practiced something called sit Shiva. It’s basically a practice where when someone is grieving, that person’s remaining loved ones bring them in; to love them and allow them to fully rest and be cleansed of their grieving. She wasn’t really jewish, but she wasn’t really not Jewish if that makes any sense. She appreciated the customs of her upbringing, but couldn’t seem to wrestle with the religion itself.

She insisted on walking me through an observational seven days of sit Shiva. A cleansing. A recognition of my dying to my old self. To my habits, to my addictions.

Her father owned a cabin in upstate near the Catskills Region. When he died two years ago, she inherited the place. She found herself in the plain and simple. He liked that about her.

When we arrived at the cabin, she had me wash my hands. Anytime I re-entered the cabin, I would continue a physical act of cleansing. In the cabin itself there weren’t any places I could run off too and things to be distracted with. It was a slow and small cabin.

That night, we made dinner.

Later, we lay down to sleep.

There is nowhere I’d rather be than with her. She softly admits to me her frustrations with me leaving her again to go off and catch-up with my addictions.

What I grieved was time lost with someone I loved.

“Close your eyes, I’ll be here in the morning. Close your eyes, I’ll be here for a while.” I say back.