"Coming Back Online"

I call it "coming back online." That moment when you first come out of drunken blackout. It's always frightening. Where am I? What is this neighborhood? What happened to my face? Where's my wallet? Some people, when they drink enough to disable their short term memory, immediately collapse into an immobile heap. This is nature's failsafe. But I lack this feature. I can walk and talk and carry a tune, yet have no idea of what's going on. I have never come back online to find myself up to any good. I have never emerged from a blackout to find that I have built a convenient spice rack or delivered a moving speech about women's rights. It's always been some fucking calamity. The last time I came back online, I was standing in my front yard having a conversation with my parents. Even in my tottering state, I knew this couldn't be a good thing. I had no idea what we were talking about. Why were we talking about it on the front lawn? At night? What time was it? Hoping for a clue, I waited for something to come out of my mouth. And here it was: "Didn't you notice I never left my room? I've been living with you for 6 months. I think I've seen each of you twice." This was bad. I knew I shouldn't be saying something like this. It sounded terribly confessional. Ever since I had gotten fired and moved back in with my parents, I had been holed in my childhood bedroom, secretly drinking and basking in an unremitting sense of personal shame. But this was all supposed to be a secret. As far as my parents knew, I was freelancing and "getting back on my feet." This scene, this mad scene, was not part of that narrative. "We were giving you your privacy. We didn't know you were getting drunk up there," my mother said. This conversation was out of control. I should just tell them I'm going to bed. I should calmly bid them a good night. So I said, "Of course I was getting drunk! Fuck! I've been drinking every goddamn day for the last ten years! What the fuck else would I be doing?" This was a poor choice of words. This was not how one calmly bids others a good night. Oh, the look on my poor mother's face... That look stayed with me. That look, the fallen face of a tired old woman, stayed with me as I lay in bed that night. It stayed with me as the alcohol wore off, as the night turned into queasy morning, as the hands began to shake, the "brain tingle" set in, as the "hell whispers" began, as I waited for them to go to work so I could sneak a bit of relief from the liquor cabinet, as the awful day wore on, as we talked that night, as I packed my stuff up, as I went off to rehab the next day. My mother is almost 70. She's small and stooped and old. When did she get so old? I just thought I would be something by now. 33 years old. I thought I would have something to show her, something to give back, something to make her proud. I thought I'd be a man. Not just a drunken failure. All those little soccer practices she took me to, all the swim lessons and therapy and errands and effort and love. What was it for? So I could be a drunken sack of shit? Why was I so fucked up? Why did I require shore-leave levels of liquor to operate properly? As I lay in bed in the rehab that first night, listening to the occasional moans of the other patients, I asked myself these questions and others. Soon, I found myself returning to the question I had been asking my entire life, the one I always retreated to in moments of self-pity, the one that seemed hold some key to my dysfunction. The one I had always been afraid to ask my mom. What about that one summer when you were dead?