A Memoir of Drinking, Stopping, and Starting Again
The Monster and Me
DAY FIVE
I’m sitting here, writing this on day five without a drink.
I've been on day five many times over the last thirty years. Day five has become a strange sort of home—familiar, bleak, echoing with the ghosts of fresh promises. But this time, it’s different.
It’s always different this time.
That’s the line I’ve told myself more times than I can count. After a long weekend — or a week-long bender, drinking morning, noon, and night. After the kind of hangover where you lie in bed praying the ground would just open up and swallow you whole. After that look — you know the one — when your wife or partner stares at you with a mix of confusion, pity, and quiet despair. A look that says, “You promised.””
I’ve seen that look too many times. And it crushes me every time — not because I don’t deserve it, but because it confirms what I already know: I’ve failed again. Broken another solemn vow, sometimes made days ago, sometimes just hours.
That’s the life of the alcoholic — a dreamlike lie where the cycle never quite feels real until it’s too late. You open your eyes after another night, another session, another blackout, and ask yourself the familiar, defeated question:
How did that happen again? I didn’t mean for it to happen.
You rise from your bed like a man who’s been dragged from a wreckage. Your body stiff, head pounding, insides trembling. It feels like you’ve been beaten.
And you have — beaten by the bottle. By yourself.
There’s no fist. No attacker. Just you — drinking again, despite everything you swore, every move you made, every desperate attempt to tame the monster that can’t be beaten. And here you are, day five. Again. Picking up the pieces. Again.
But still — I'm writing this.
And that, in itself, is something. A fragile, flickering something. I don't know if this time really is different. But I know this: every day I don't drink is a quiet rebellion. Every word I write is a defiance of the voice in my head that says, “You’ll never change.”
So here I am. Day five.
Tired.
But trying.