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sleep gets dramatically cut down and he doesn’t go out as much as before, but he’s still happily flitting from bar to bar at least a few times a month.
    He’s always been a social person—drinking Scotch with his men friends in private clubs, bar-hopping, flirting with PR girls, speaking at media events, playing poker till dawn. He’s even picked up a new hobby—DJing—and came home once at 5 a.m., explaining that Mildred insisted he drop by for a nightcap afterwards.
    I’m cross-eyed from a jaw-grindingly sober, sleepless night when he stumbles home that morning, but I say nothing because I’m already plotting how I’m going to get over this disappointment by drinking.
    He tells me about his escapades because I ask. I joke that I’m living vicariously through him. I’m sure he doesn’t tell me everything. Which is okay because I don’t tell him everything. I don’t tell him anything.
    Because of my drinking I consciously avoid conflict and confrontation. I no longer ask about his coffees with women who “needed help getting into the magazine industry.”
    In the past, this sort of eagerness (to help) often created tensions in our relationship, but now that I’ve secrets of my own, I’ve become generous and permissive, often even encouraging his socializing: What is Liz up to these days? Yes, I really do feel bad about Mildred’s ex-husband being a dick, I think you should call her back.
    Instead of focusing on my boyfriend’s intriguing, socially devouring life, I should probably pay closer attention to mine. Life, that is—my simple, socially isolated life.
    I need to sort myself out. Before I screw things up with the boyfriend or hurt myself badly enough to go beyond the bruises.
    It is almost the end of August and I have had a continuous string of hollow nights and there may be clues everywhere, like puzzle pieces, but I can’t put them together into anything coherent because there are too many blanks in between. The blanks trump whatever narrative I try to come up with.
    This is because I’m a blackout drinker,
almost
always have been, and now that the blackouts are here—they are
always
here now—I start to feel a little concerned. As it was in the past, I am amused and worried about the person that takes over when I check out. She looks like me except that her eyes are gone. Replaced by marbles. Her legs are mine but the knees are inside-out. Her fingers dial numbers that I no longer remember; her mouth talks about things I have never even thought about or have tried not to think about. And what if perhaps she doesn’t like children? Who’s going to stop her?
    I get scared enough to look up online some programs that deal with problems like mine.
    Because I don’t think I’m that bad (for example, you’d never see me hiding with a bottle of vodka in my bed at two in the afternoon, now, would you?), I decide I need a mild kind of solution. Not actual rehab but maybe rehab light. Despite being aware of the distance between wanting and needing getting smaller, I still harbour the idea that I haven’t crossed the line. What kind of line I’m not entirely sure—perhaps the line that will divide the necessity from the absolute desperation.
    I can’t go all the way to admitting that my drinking is a big problem. Having gone to AA meetings in the past, I know I’m not capable of that kind of commitment. Right now, I don’t even meet the only requirement of AA membership: a desire to stop drinking.
    At this point, I still doublethink myself into agreeing that I only need a little adjustment to get back to feeling normal.
    I don’t know if I really need a program that deals with addictions—I wouldn’t go that far—but at the same time, just in case, I know that I could do something to learn to manage better, to perhaps train my body to only want a bit—a can of lemon-tinted beer or two, no more—and to not disappoint me with another blackout.
    So I’m looking for a commitment I could