Wednesday 11/09/2005 11:00:00 PM

This site gets lotsa hits from people searching for 'how to live with an alcoholic'. Variations include wife and husband.

The question isn't how to live with them. It's how to live with yourself. Whether you're the alcoholic or the other.

Since that's what it's all about. Every drink. A way to live with oneself. Though moreso, a means to live without.

For the drinker it's about escape. Getting lost. And I guess for their partner it must be about finding. You can't find anyone who doesn't want to be found. The best you can do is mark a path that they may follow should they ever decide to come back.

You can live with an alcoholic quite easily. Just share the same residence and don't refer too often to their drinking. It's as simple as that.

But if what you really want is to understand one, you never can, until you are one. And even still, each has their own reasons. Their own doors that won't shut and windwos that won't open.

The kind of personality that needs alcohol to cope isn't made, it's born. We're different from sober people. Different down to our very DNA. We see the world in full color, but we prefer the grays. We crave power over our emotions. To the extent that we'll drown them in this drug to convince ourselves we have some kind of dominance. Though, if anything, with that act we've relinquished the last shred of power we might've had.

That's not to say we're all alike. We just all have this one weakness in common. Alcoholics come in all forms, but at some point. Given too much, we do all become the same.

Ghosts the living see, but can no longer touch. Forests so thick with trees that no single one is dicernable. Leaves that drop wihtout a sound. Without a destination. Consumed with the act of falling.

You can gather them into piles, but they'll just blow away. No branch can hold them. No weight had precendence. Driven only by the colors that they change.

Over time everything changes. Everything except this compulsion to never be myself again.

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