Will You Keep It Together?
By Evan Lambert
There’s a point in your life when life stops smiling back. It maybe catches your eye, looks you over, but doesn’t pause or betray a twinkle of friendliness; it just keeps walking to its table, double-fisting vodka sodas. Then it makes out with your boyfriend.
In its absence, monotony takes over. And when you’re sober, that monotony becomes louder. The tick, tick, tick of the clock becomes the deafening stomp, stomp, stomp of Beyoncé performing “End of Time” at the 2013 Super Bowl.
And you have nothing to drown it out.
And then, a pandemic hits. Memes about solo wine nights flood your Insta feed. You need something to distract yourself, something that isn’t alcohol. Then you wonder if you should take up CrossFit. Then you remember all the CrossFit gyms are closed. So you plant vegetables that die; you adopt two cats who live; you create a personal budget. You paint, read, sketch, yo-yo, learn Spanish, master Breath of the Wild. You learn about your country’s electoral process and decide that Queerty explained it ten times better than your high school government teacher.
Then, finally, you cry. Because you can do all of the above, every day, for as long as you want, but you’ll always cry – because you’re in a pandemic. And you’re sober. There’s no way to deny it, no way out; you can’t even go to the park or get stress-bottomed by a stranger without wondering if you’ll give your roommates Covid. But then your roommates give you Covid anyway, because they just went to a small dinner party hosted by 50 of their closest friends. And so, you permanently lose 25% of your sense of smell – and then you can’t even smell smoke or farts or roses anymore – and you decide, screw it, I’m going to go on Grindr, and you accidentally tell someone that you’re sober after they showed you their penis and – oops, they just blocked you.
Oops, you forgot that sobriety is a turn-off to some gay guys – right there alongside anal messiness and being 5’7”. You forgot that your sobriety makes some gay men look at you with fear in their eyes – like they might catch it, like they might invent Truvada for Sobriety just so they can bareback without contracting sobriety. You also forgot that your sobriety has always made you off-kilter, like a sailor getting his sea legs, like a fawn learning to walk. You forgot that you can’t be one of those hilarious gay Instagram personalities kicking back at home with their champagne flutes and their toy poodles and ending every joke with “thank yew.”
And, again, you have nothing to drown this all out. No ciders, no mimosas, no rosés, no vodka sodas. If you turned to those, you’d tumble into the abyss again. The pandemic would become the least of your problems.
So you move to Virginia, to home, to the place you swore you’d never return to – to your family, to those friends that you still keep in touch with – to those muggy nights swamped with the chirping of crickets, to the Grindr home screen that is 75% more likely to be full of blank black squares than the one in New York City – to the childhood bedroom, to the lower prices on organic food, to the books you bought in high school and always wanted to read and … You breathe. You smell lemons and roses and eucalyptus oil every day to get your smell back. You read The House of Mirth. You go on virtual dates with a guy from Tinder who teaches you how to longboard and doesn’t care that you’re 5’7”. Then you break up with him because he’s ten years younger than you and a college student at Yale, and you’re a grown-ass person.
And then you realize what everyone else is realizing by now. You remember that life sucks and that everyone around you is also depressed and dealing with their own issues, and that drinking isn’t the only solution. Your mind has tricked you into thinking it’s a solution, because everyone’s only making jokes about drinking right now; it’s low-hanging fruit, and no one wants real fruit right now, unless it’s fermented. But really, everyone else is painting and reading and sketching and yo-yo-ing and learning Spanishing and mastering Breath of the Wild, too. Seriously, you will find that at least five of your friends – who have never played a video game in their entire lives – have played Breath of the Wild.
And then you’ll reach your 3 ½-year sobriety anniversary, on May 25, and you’ll realize that you can stay sober forever, if you want. After all, you’ve made it through this last year – possibly the hardest test of your sobriety yet – and you’ve passed. And thrived. And smiled. And life, finally, has smiled back. And you’re never going to longboard again.
Congratulations. You made it.
Evan Lambert (he/him; they/them) is a career copywriter and journalist who has written for Mic, Queerty, People Magazine, and Out.com. He's currently traveling the globe (safely), working on a novel, and achieving his final form. If you find him on Instagram at @icantevannnn, he'll follow you back, since he only has 700 followers and should really work on that. This is his first time being published in a literary journal.