I read you. All week, by the dozens every day, I received you in my mailbox. As if lying on that imagined couch between us, deposited in complete confidence, in a way that continues to make me feel so privileged, you have again played the game of free association, of that intimate storytelling that perhaps even surprised yourselves, by its astonishing, lucid revelations, above all full of meaning. You delivered to me courageously, unvarnished and without detour, your watered stories, your delicious intoxications, sometimes followed by those disillusioned tomorrows, all those times when shame caught you in the morning, at the same time as the bad surprises that slumbered your sides.
You also blew towards me these few traumatic fragments of your childhoods soaked in the smells of beer from the father, the uncle or the grandfather, from this car which zigzags when returning late at night, you in the back seat, frightened , the smell of that convenience store wine that failed to prevent the suicides of your mothers.
You also made me smile at the sublime descriptions of all your love rituals, imbued with a sensuality to make Eros himself blush, accompanying your encounters with the divine substance. From the “pop” of the bottle of champagne to the “click” of the can of beer, from jazz in the background, to natural wine lived as a cultural experience, full, alive, you spoke to me of desire and pure joy .
I could imagine you dancing on those sticky floors between two shooters “, exalting the life that you did not know was still fragile, at this age that you had. I tracked your rising denial along with the number of drinks per night per week. I rocked with you in the shocks of alcohol which no longer becomes joyful, but which pulls us down from the bed, under the mattress, every morning, with black eyes, screaming liver, makeup that doesn’t hides nothing. I admired your months of sobriety, counted the years with you, loved reading jewels such as: “I went from spirit to spiritual. »
I felt with you the vertigo of your emptiness, wanting so much to talk to you about mine too, about that of all those others who have already told me about the treasures they had found all those times they had dared dip. You spoke to me about funds: funds per tonne, funds per barrel, life at full speed, but also funds affected, when you get to the end of everything.
“It is in this flabby and clogged universe that one morning, the day and I no longer got up. The seasons have faded. My shadow fled me. My sanity is gone. The valves gave way, and I was overwhelmed. I failed somewhere deep inside me,” Jean wrote.
The bottom of the void, divine for some, only existential or luminous for others, a kind of bottom which is not one, it is about this bottom that you spoke to me the most. For some of you, these backgrounds were lined with the faces of your children, whom you no longer wanted to keep away, encumber, hinder. For others, the bottom line was the end of shame, the end of slavery, something like freedom. For still others, it was a matter of simply being present-in-the-world, advancing “the headwind”, to encounter a life that could very well be yours, the only one you have.
I wanted to tell you that I was with you, in this umpteenth attempt to put on as many days as possible by enduring the thirst long enough to see what was on the other side. I had these words from Desjardins: “Behind the dune, it’s the ocean” in mind, reading your fears of not being able to cross the evening, without opening the bottle.
You also told me about the need for a ” break », of not « knowing everything all the time about everything that kills us », of the hegemony of a morality which ends up… making you want to drink. You have described this vicious circle linking the performance of living to anxiety, to alcohol, to the performance of living found the next day, to anxiety, to alcohol found in the evening, and so on. You spoke to me about this demanding parenthood and about these women, above all, who “carry life at arm’s length, with the little glass, the little glasses,” like rewards, stopovers, where, finally, something in them could be deposited, lived in a mode other than that which burdens the head with an existence that has become so complicated.
You have spoken to me of balance, of sobriety through long breaks or of gentle dependence assumed. You spoke to me about the happiness of partying, of celebrating, of “escaping it” too, because “perhaps that’s also what life is sometimes: escaping it” as if we were leaving the world carry us for a moment, in this complete reversal of the posture continually demanded of us.
I contemplated with you the loneliness that you drew right there, like a circle of cold on the skin of the belly, in the center of you, under layers of shame. I wanted to rock it a little with you, to surround it with indulgence, without completely freeing you from it, just because it also allows you to stop lying to yourself, sometimes, shame. She sometimes gives this tiny momentum to turn things around, to sign a real pact of love with oneself. It is sometimes the last stopover before the bottom, the shame.
This week, you have “let the void shine,” as in the Hessian phrase that one of you reverberated to me. With your intelligence and your courage, you have shifted the question of “to drink or not to drink” to the big question of the meaning we give to the things we experience.
I have received your words as offerings, in this endless conversation. In doing so, we may have touched together on another bottom, that of the “bottom of things”, which lodges behind the regulations and the guides to good conduct, which does not reassure anyone with blows of certainty, which lives only in interior, which unfolds in a thousand and one shades of voices and personal stories.