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I knew I loved you then.

tec

I’m lying here next to my husband and it’s almost 2am. In the trick of the dim light, he looks like someone I only half recognize. Which is an interesting metaphor for everything else.

My brain can’t wrap around the fact that he drank. I saw him a couple times before he got sober–before we met–, but I didn’t know him. I noticed him while he was detoxing, but didn’t know him then either. No, the Chris I knew was the sunbeam who walked around making everything brighter. And he’d probably argue it was all me. He’d probably say his sunshine came from my existence.

I dunno about all that.

I don’t know him as an active alcoholic nor a drunk. I only know him in recovery and sober and clean. And so I look at him now, with the light hitting his face all wrong. And he is not the Chris that I know. He is not the Chris I experienced for the past two weeks. He is not the Chris of the last 34 hours, since finding out he had been drinking and is now detoxing.

I’m just not sure who he is. I’m not sure he knows right now though either. And I think maybe that’s okay. I don’t have to recognize him just yet. The caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly and isn’t recognizable through every stage. I don’t have to recognize him to know his value. His worth. His goodness.

What I do know is that I’m not going anywhere. And that’s all I need to know right now.

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Just wait and see.

tec

I know I’m in “get ready for vacation” mode, and that’s probably all it is, but the joy of purging and cleaning and being productive toward the goals I’ve been working toward for months has turned to mist before my eyes. It feels like, in this moment, the life has been sucked out of me.

I’m still go go go because I’m getting the house ready and packing and doing last minute things. But it’s all for a very specific, short term goal. And that seems easy. But the thought of working for a goal that is long term feels…nauseating.

I’m certain this will pass. I’m certain it’s nothing to even worry about. I just needed to acknowledge it. Because it felt healthier than pretending it wasn’t there.

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I saw the world spin beneath you.

tec

I thought it couldn’t get worse this morning. Or maybe I knew that it would and that’s why I was so terrified.

I was even more scared when Chris told me about catching me talking to some guy on fb. A guy I had never heard of.

Apparently he had been hallucinating.

And now here I sit sobbing in my son’s room because it seems my husband has been drinking for two weeks.

Enough to be hallucinating.

And hiding it, while I sit obliviously by.

After six years and a half years of sobriety.

And I just cannot express how alone I am.

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Swallow the light from the sun.

tec

It’s like the glass floor beneath my feet has spiderweb’d into a million stray lines that, at any moment, could splinter to their end and fall away completely.

I haven’t written in forever. I post on twitter occasionally, but I didn’t take the time to transfer them here like I had planned to. I didn’t write when life got really amazing and Chris was the embodiment of all I always knew he could be–better than the picture I had in mind even. And I didn’t write when mental illness took him from me–for the weeks of his anxiety at a level I had yet to experience from him, and he hadn’t experienced himself in over a decade; for the endless loop of anger and confrontation I didn’t know was possible to direct at me; for the impatience I didn’t know he could direct at our children; for the revolving anxiety and depression and paranoia and insomnia; for the random moments of cognizance that dripped with apology and hope that he could come back to himself by sheer will.

And then he was himself again. I was cautious, but I could tell I had him back. That it was the real him. For a bit. For a couple days. For a few.

And then yesterday it wasn’t him again. And I cried. And then he took a walk with our son and they had a good time. After they got home, he texted to say it felt like I was upset with him. I told him I felt on edge from our conversation earlier. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He didn’t text back more because he had gotten very tired (as one would after a long day of hard labor) and he fell asleep.

After he got up, he got almost belligerently, unreasonably upset about his family (his parents and sister) and couldn’t be calmed about it. Then told me he still didn’t know what I was talking about in our text conversation. I recounted our conversation from earlier in the day and he stared at me blankly.

He has no memory of that conversation.

And so here I am now, writing. Because I feel lost and this is how I find me. I love my husband like nobody’s business. I don’t know what to do. He needs to go to the doctor, but I can’t make him. We have vacation coming up in a couple days. I don’t know when the floor under me is going to shatter further. I don’t want to survive him slipping away from me. Yet I’d have no choice.

I am terrified.