Kate and I are at a wedding reception.  I’m not sure who has gotten married.  It isn’t either of us.  The reception is outside, in a wood.  There are lights in the trees and a band playing somewhere.  We pass a cluster of tree stumps where a group of golden illuminated beers are set.  Kate picks up a beer.  She turns to me.

“Come on French, it won’t matter.  It’s just a beer.”

I grab one of the beers and waltz off, following Kate into the woods, laughing.  Why am I stressed about a beer anyway?  Haven’t I been good enough?

I stumble into another clearing.  There is no one there.  No lights, no music.  I’m dizzy and feel sick.  I bend at my waist, holding my hands cupped under my mouth.  Into my hands begins to fall shards of glass.  I want to stop and look at the glass.  I want to yell for help.  But the glass is falling out of my mouth faster and faster, bright pieces of light streaked in blood.  Suddenly, I am throwing up huge mouthfuls of glass.  It’s pouring out of me, tearing me apart from the inside.  My lips are gone and my arms are torn to ribbons.  I can’t stop vomiting glass.

I woke up in tears.

And needless to say, it’s been hard for me to sleep the last couple of days.

I dragged half my pillows to the opposite end of my bed.  It’s a copping mechanism that seems to happen without my thinking about it.  Usually for about a week in the winter, when anxiety is high, I end up sleeping with my head at the foot of my bed, on the opposite side from where I usually sleep.  Last week I knew that closing my eyes would mean seeing my hands bloodied and full of glass, so it has helped, somehow, to be at the opposite end of the bed.  I don’t pretend it makes sense.

I also don’t pretend that I am an ancient Israelite in service of the Pharaoh.  Dream interpretation isn’t my strong suit.  Now, I usually only have vivid, memorable dreams when I am intensely stressed out.  (Writing my senior thesis in college, I had a two week long series of dreams in which a friend tried to murder me and I escaped and he chased my through 1970s San Francisco.  I was writing about William Faulkner, so it didn’t even thematically fit.)  I hadn’t thought that I was particularly stressed; not any more than the usual work, family, weight, money, basic necessities of life crap.

Today I felt as though I had a belly full of glass, while waking.

One of my students had a really terrible day.  She cried and cried and I had to hold her and rock her until she calmed down.  She had had a disagreement with her friends, and she has been having some trouble controlling herself lately, so she just became overwrought.  She told me that she had wanted to tell me for a while that she was sad, but that every time she tried I acted like I didn’t have time for her and didn’t care how she felt.

It was awful.

I felt the same as I had in my dream: helpless, alone, trapped in reaction that I couldn’t control.  When I drank I threw up a lot.  I was rather talented at vomiting.  But it terrified me.  Sometimes I would throw up so much, and for so long, that I wouldn’t be able to breath.  I would feel as if my whole body was filling up; that what I wanted out of me so desperately was going to invade every space and cut off any chance I had of escape.

When it was alcohol, at least I knew what the immediate poison I wanted to expel was.  Now, I’m not sure exactly what is inside of me that has consumed me to the point I fear harm from inside, that I am distracted into indifference.   What have I taken into myself that needs to be taken out again?

My friend Mary drove me home after work.  She listened to me babble about how upset I was.  Before I got out of the car, she asked me, “What are you going to do now?”  I told her the truth, I don’t know.  I don’t know yet exactly what’s wrong, so I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know what I need to change.

I don’t know how to free myself without being sliced to pieces.

(3 Years, 4 Months, and 19 Days Sober)