“Sparkly cars,” my daughter and I report. “There’s one!” we shout to each other all the way to school. The sunshine glances off the frosted cars, still crusty in driveways we pass. Steam swirls into the sunrise above snowy rooftops. Our tires crunch the ice. Thanksgiving is past, and the first proper snow of the season has knocked down the last leaves, the brown ones clinging to the oaks in the neighborhood.

It’s all beginnings and endings and sparkle and shadows around here.

Like grief, my sobriety changes shape and color all the time. It pops up suddenly, prompted by something or nothing. If December 2 is my soberversary, December 1 is the anniversary of my last dark night. This occurs to me, as if for the first time, as the sun sets on the 1st. This is a literal dark night, sun gone by 5:30, long shadows paling to an even dark. We have three more weeks until the solstice. If I’d kept going, would I have been dead by the solstice, or just stumbling deeper into absence? A lot can happen. Dumb numbers come to mind, like that myth about 21 days to form a habit, but I’d accidentally assigned myself 21 days to weather, in the dark, before the light would start to gain on it again.

I consult the calendar, thinking my last night would’ve been a weeknight. Lots of us try rules first, groping for moderation. No weeknights, or only [these weeknights], only [insert type of alcohol], only with [people], only under [conditions]. Or maybe only on good days. Or on the worst of the bad days. Because that’s what a person would do, drink at the end of a hard day, or celebrate at the end of a good one. It was a Wednesday, that last December 1. So my first alcohol-free day, on this side of things, was a Thursday. No Thirsty Thursday specials for me. Just Thinking It Through Thursday, Dry Friday, Sober Saturday… you get the idea.

Moderation had been hinting at the edges of my life. My first legal drink was a single appletini, at dinner with my mother, on my birthday proper. My first concert? James Taylor—basically a contemporary of my parents—with my parents. Don’t those particulars sound like they could’ve been telling? A tame but pleasant life. One of the “quit lit” titles I’ve read talks about a quiet, little life. She means that smaller but calmer sense that comes over things once alcohol’s out of the equation. Smaller like simple, not like less. Little things get bigger. 

Turns out moderation wasn’t in the cards. The data showed as much. Drinking, whenever, was about dulling the features, of everything, big or small. Mandated rest by way of oblivion. When I fantasize about going back, it’s like that, the way it was at the end. It’s never about a casual drink here or there. It’s not social drinking, or rules that work, or moderation. It’s pouring the glass tall enough to turn off my brain. Alcohol is a drug, and I use it as such in my fantasies.

I don’t plan on going back. Never say never, but I know what I intend now, today. Life is treacherous enough. It will get me anyway. A poetry teacher once started class remarking about a neighbor who’d died in the driveway, slipping on the ice and hitting her head. “Can you imagine?” he asked. There are so many ways to slip. On the ice, off the wagon, as it were. Slip away with the seasons, stepping into a long shadow and disappearing. Slipping under the surface of a drink. I don’t get so attached to the route anymore, or so surprised by an outcome.

We crunch over the icy buildup gathered at the edge of the road. A minivan barely slides to a stop short of the crosswalk. We drive into the bright sunshine, the start of a new day, and start to pick our way across the path.

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