Birthday Blues
What they don’t tell you about celebrating your sobriety date is that it has a strange tendency to coincide with the anniversary of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.
There is a me from before it happened and a me from after.
And when I look at her I feel a tremendous sense of guilt.
Because I didn’t save her.
I couldn’t save her.
She needed me and I wasn’t there.
In every other universe, I died that day.
In every other universe, my father came home from work 5 minutes later and five minutes later was too late.
In every other universe, my father came home to a corpse.
By most accounts, I shouldn’t be alive today.
By the rest, it’s a miracle that I’m alive today.
And sometimes, when I tell people about this, they ask what I’m doing with my second chance at life.
And that’s just about the cruelest question I can imagine asking someone who was nearly killed in their pursuit of a memoir-worthy life.