After a thorough detox session in a hospital to get me started on (what I hope will be) a lifetime of sobriety, I decided to spend my first alcohol-free year focusing exclusively on me.  Along with getting my physical and mental health into fierce shape, this also meant that I would avoid temptations of the flesh and not allow myself to get entangled with the opposite sex, for fear that it would simply complicate my vulnerable state.  In other words, I took a vow of celibacy.  

The amount of drunken amnesia sex I have had is a bit mortifying; the quality of the men that I allowed myself to give the time of day to, even more so.  I’m not sure if there’s a euphemism for “loser,” but that’s precisely the sort of chap that I gave myself over to on many, many occasions.  Directionless, aimless, often jobless, noncommunicative men who adored the fact that they were getting no-strings-attached sex from what was clearly a very sick lady.  So long as I put out and remained “fun”, these fellows didn’t take any issue with the fact that my breakfast typically consisted of vodka-and-soda, and that I stayed in an obliterated state for as long as I could keep myself conscious.  In fact, they often enabled my alarming behaviour by joining me, or purchasing alcohol for me, or laughing off any concerns I voiced to them about my problem.

This is not to say that I am blame-free, as for many years I decided that living like a rock star was the best way to go--seeing as I had failed to legitimately become one--and that getting shitfaced and having loads of carefree sex was a worthwhile lifestyle to pursue. I had fun, I most certainly did, but ending up in a Costa Rican hospital with the beginnings of alcoholic hepatitis was not something I had ever foreseen despite my unspeakable, shameful, lethal, eventually-drinking-on-the-job habit. By the time I returned to Canada and admitted myself to the live-in detox centre, I felt like a used-up whore and a drunk, and that’s because I kind of was.

 So: no sex for me. Not for a solid year.

 ...until the five-month itch set in and I realized that getting laid was paramount to my survival. Just once. Just one good session of solid boinking would right the wrongs, and I could continue on with my journey of newfound sobriety, adapting to a world that I wasn’t yet sure how to navigate in an entirely lucid, emotionally-haywire state. I had gone from nonstop shagging across several continents to eating sacks of wine gums by myself every night in a rent-controlled Victoria apartment. I was suffering. Self-love wasn’t doing the trick; I needed a man pressed on top of me, drilling me, kissing me, muttering to me, pulling my hair, and then shuffling off back to his house after awkwardly putting his pants back on. It didn’t have to be someone I knew or liked; in fact, itcouldn’t be someone I knew or liked. It had to be a random guy that I had no past with, who was entirely unconnected to my network of acquaintances, and who could simply come in and out of my life, in a manner of speaking....

...continued tomorrow....

continued day after tomorrow...