2026: Chapter 16

I used to feel after coming back from a long layoff without smoking weed — even if it was only a month or two — the sensation that I was coming home. That the world was in some way not real to me unless I was high. This feeling normally did not often manifest itself because marijuana was my drug of choice and I was high almost all the time. But it did happen: Typically when I was on the verge of a new job and I needed to be clean.

It’s been a similar sort of deal over the last year when I have taken sizable breaks from drinking and then, poof, I am right back in front of a bar staring down an ice cold Corona. It need not sound so dramatic, of course: It’s just beer. I’m not going from absolute zero to downing a goddam bottle of Jack Daniels before breakfast, for example. My alcoholism has always been more a matter of routine than physical need.

But just as with smoking weed after some time away from it, drinking does reveal a different truth than sobriety is capable of delivering. Because everything with sobriety is extremely intentional: The way I am able to save money. The way I am able to stay home in lieu of going out and potentially ending up at a casino. The pain I have to confront that leads to truths I don’t even know of — these all were (and are) byproducts of a very intentional decision-making process.

The old adage that Drunk People Never Lie is a tired one, but there’s a reason it’s a cliché. No amount of sobriety could teach me the truths I figure out almost (if not entirely) by accident while I am drinking, and, although the drunk truth might not mean as much after I wake up the following day, it isn’t for nothing at all. Whether I am intentionally looking for it and finding it, or if it’s by pure happenstance, the truth is still the truth.

It is thus how my recent vacation brought me, accidentally, of course, the answer to a question I wasn’t aware that I had been asking myself. I sometimes exhaust many words saying very little, and the impetus for going on vacation in the first place was one of those instances. I might’ve said I was sick of the casino, or that the economics of taking time away didn’t make any sense, or the fact that I was as flush financially as I’d ever been made such a decision easier, etc. I noted all of these items as my means to admit nothing.

The real truth is I have been stressing myself out over a woman for the last several months, and I needed to get away from her. I am in love with a woman who does not love me same way that I love her. I am forced more often than not (er, more days than not) to work in the same building on the same casino floor in the same general vicinity as the one woman in the world who has captured my heart. I am so close and so far away so regularly to the one who makes me feel so strongly about the world, and every day it pains me.

When I was on vacation, posting whatever drivel found its way from my fingertips onto the screen of my Instagram account, a quite stunning woman whom for many years I have known decided to message me, and so the two of us maintained a regular sort of exchange for the next week or so. Nothing really compares to those first handful of days, when it is made clear that the interest is and has been mutual for months, if not years, but that it really was as simple as one party making the first move.

This particular girl is so pretty, or hot, or whatever you want to call it, that I have always played the quintessential role of Eric Reining — as if I ever had a choice — by way of simply saying ‘hello’ on occasion and keeping my head down, looking towards the floor. She gets so much attention from every other man, all the time, that she doesn’t need me to give her any of mine. It’s ironic how often my shyness and/or standoffishness inevitably works to my benefit in situations such as these.

What’s crazy, though, is she thinks I am really something. She thinks I am smart. She thinks I am handsome. She thinks I’m sexy. All the while, while I have been respectful and empathetic to her egregious and unforgivable crime of being hot, I have inadvertently made her insecure for not being pretty enough or smart enough or generally good enough to be worthy of me, and this she has made clear. Nothing makes any goddam sense.

So what is this truth I was touching on earlier, the one that has, so far, taken me like four paragraphs to explain? The truth I realized unintentionally and somewhat inebriated was this: It’s kinda fucking nice to feel wanted once in a while. For months and months and months I have been banging my head against the wall over a woman I love, who probably doesn’t love me back, or at least not in the way that I want and/or need her to, and then suddenly the world opened itself back up again, and removed from me the pains in my stomach, and the poisons and doubts and wonders and confusions in my brain.

It felt like I was coming up for air after being stuck beneath the ocean for far too long. It felt like Clint Eastwood must’ve felt in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly when Eli Wallach dragged him through the desert and water passed through his chapped lips. It felt like I had been trapped, living paralyzed within the lie that only love can weave, and the truth didn’t return inasmuch as I simply wasn’t able to see it. But there it was. Again.

I’m probably not the most arrogant man you have ever met, but I would bet that I am pretty close. I’m probably not the most confident man you have ever met, but it’s just an objective fact that when it is I do want something I normally get it — whatever it may be. I never said I was the best. All I ever said was: Name me someone who does it better.

And I am wrong about everything I just wrote in the paragraph above; you caught me. But I’m also right. What’s been a painful intellectual exercise over this last year is forgetting how right I usually am. It’s in forgetting how smart I think I am, or how handsome I try to be, or how sexy I aspire to be in spite of being a five-foot-seven white guy of average skinny-muscular build without any real or special physical qualities about him. I have forgotten it all.

So it took an attractive Colombian woman with all the special physical features that Colombian women generally exude to remind me, Eric, of who the fuck I really am. It sounds stupid — the opposite of smart — and this I know. But just as one gets lost in the ecstasy of love, one also gets lost in the pitfalls of love that cannot be, or never was. Either, or both, are as intoxicating as alcohol itself. The love you feel, and the love you can’t. They make you believe you are somebody you most certainly aren’t.

I have been blessed to have experienced the love of, and for, multiple women over the course of my life. It is never an easy thing for me, from either direction. It seems one party always loves the other with more enthusiasm, and so it is, as Chuck Klosterman once said, that the one who loves the other less is the one in control of the relationship. I never quite liked how true and real such a statement was/is, but it obviously resonated.

Knowing me, it probably isn’t much of a surprise that I have spent the duration of my days attempting to thread that needle. Where the power dynamic isn’t so much a 70/30 or 80/20 type of deal, but more like 50/50. A stable exchange. Where the woman is so fucking great that the prospect of losing her makes me feel scared, and vulnerable, and insecure, and the same is true from the opposite side. It really is such a delicate line.

And whenever I love somebody I always believe that’s what I have. That balance, I mean. But I don’t, really. In most cases I have been the winner, the one in control of the relationship, having more leverage over the other for no reason beyond my arrogance and pride and willing admission that if push ever came to shove I would be okay in the end. It’s been an incredibly rare circumstance for me to feel stronger about somebody than they feel about me.

Yet, such a scenario is exactly what has led me to this point. It is what drove me to feel so miserable and have the wherewithal to eschew a week’s worth of pay and burn forty hours of vacation time. Unrequited love makes the world go round, does it not? It always leaves somebody hung out to dry, searching, always, for the person who will not make them feel that way. Then once they find that person, they realize that they, and not the other, are the one in control, and thus they get bored of them. The love turns unrequited yet again, only this time from the opposite side, and thus the cycle repeats itself. Forever.

So we can never discount the impact it has to feel wanted. We have to acknowledge the fruits that such a sensation bears: The taste of water, the smell of air, the ease with which one is allowed to walk with their head held high and their chest pushed out down any ordinary hallway, the words that so casually are able again to fall off the tongue, the smiles and the laughter that one need to no longer force, the confidence that becomes again real confidence, the arrogance that isn’t so arrogant because… it’s true. When one is wanted, everything about life is made better.

I didn’t know until I started drinking again how important any of this was. I was instead so fixated on my perpetual struggle to make everything work, to fit the square peg into the round hole, forgetting that what I really needed was the simplest of reminders. That I’m actually not as bad as I think I am. That, really, I’m pretty decent. That there are those who feel about me the same way I have so strongly felt about somebody whom it was never going to work out with.