Regrets. I have so many of them.
I realize now that they’re one of the reasons I kept drinking as I got older. Alcohol didn’t make the regrets disappear. It just drowned them out for a while.
Now I sit here sober, with too much time and too many memories, and I cry a lot. Maybe crying isn’t becoming for an old man, but there’s nobody around to see me, so it makes no fucking difference.
I watch TV and see a father with his daughter, and I lose it. I see couples who have spent a lifetime together and still look at each other with love. I cry.
I think about my brother. He once rescued me from a drug overdose in Golden Gate Park, but years later I couldn’t rescue him from a nursing home. That one hurts.
I see people who made the world better and made other people’s lives better. Then I look back at the years I wasted drinking, and I wonder what I might have done differently.
I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know if this ankle will ever fully heal or whether I’ll lose my independence. I wonder if people will ever respect me again—and sometimes I wonder whether I deserve it.
But today I’m sober. And sober means I can’t drown any of this out anymore.
I have lost people. I have lost time. I have lost love.
And some days, all I have left are tears and regrets.
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