The Blackout Part 2

An excerpt from How to Love Someone. In part 2 of The Blackout, the protagonist finally tells us about the fateful night that would change her most defining relationships, that with the love of her life and with herself. She takes us on an exploration of her unconscious and we see how even in the absence of certain knowing, even stumbling gracelessly through, one can indeed choose herself.

I am also the greatest fool. I love another more than I love myself, and I taught my beloved how to bind me to herself, and now no one can set me free.

-Merlin

Now I have arrived, dear friend, the reader, at telling you about the event that, albeit fuzzy and dissonant, I insisted happened, while others insisted that it did not. Even though my insistence was dumb and full of self-loathing, it was also a stand for my soundness of mind, for the validity of my experience. Unfortunately, it was a stand that came too little too late. A good idea stillborn.

Of The Boyfriend’s close crew of punk rock friends, a new guy had entered the scene a couple years before, and with him The Boyfriend had become very close. Most of The Boyfriend’s other friends were pretty well put-together for a bunch of lousy punks. And none of them thought too highly of me. A fun twist, in which I found both resentment and delight, was that this new best friend had the most in common with me of any of his friends. He was a lousy drunk, constantly blacking out and doing some horrifying thing or another. Calling The Boyfriend from someplace he didn’t recognize, having misplaced his phone and could we come get him or whatever. He was hopelessly broken, always showing up late and hungover, still wearing last night’s mistakes. He was pathologically self-centered and self-destructive. Even though he cared deeply for his friends, when impulse came to shove, he was incapable of considering them over his own compulsions. And because I recognized this creature on a cellular level, I knew it was because he was drowning, unable to escape an intolerable pain, no matter how much drinking or fucking he did.

For weeks before the incident, the best friend and I had started to make eyes at each other behind The Boyfriend’s back. Frankly, I’m surprised we had gone as long as we had without doing something so dumb and cruelly self-indulgent. We were both slave to an irrepressible instinct to implode our lives, especially if they were going well, which in our own drunken way, they kind of were.

I was singing in a band, and I loved it. We were recording and playing out. This one night after band practice, I was feeling a little keyed up and reckless. I went to the bar where the best friend worked under the pretense of looking for The Boyfriend. In fact, I figured he wouldn’t be there, and I hadn’t even checked at home first. As the last of the paying customers left for the night, instead of doing the usual closing routine, the best friend and I just sat there across the bar from each other throwing back shots. I don’t remember what we said to each other to get to that decision. In my mind’s eye, I see it as though I were a guest watching from across the room. I can’t hear what they’re saying over the din of the restaurant. I just think to myself, “Those look like two dumb assholes about to do something very stupid.” And then I’m back in my body, but it fades in and out of black.

I thud the glass back on the bar with all the weight of my useless drunk arm.

Another.  It goes down this time without so much as a tingle.

The words coming out of our mouths, of my mouth, start to slur together into one soft buzz. Can we not talk, or can I not hear? Then those questions disappear altogether, and I feel something hard under my chin. The bar top. I put my head down and watch through my one winking eye the best friend’s jaunty movements. He lurches forward and leans heavily on the bar. He moves like in a viewfinder, stopping in one pose and starting in another. I realize he’s not in an old-timey movie. As hard as I try to hold them open, my eyes are heavy and blinking.

Black. So quiet you can hear the still.

Then, for a moment, I can make out an image, but for all I can tell it’s just my own eyelashes. My body is moving, but I can’t figure out who is moving it. My muscles are like Jell-o against something hard. What is that? The floor? It’s almost pitch black with just a blue glow around the edges of things. Then my eyes get heavy again.

Man, hard as I try, I just cannot hold it together.

Blink. I was out again. But for how long?

Now my eyes open wide to see four figures sitting on stools and milk crates behind the bar in the neon glow of the bar lights and the coolers and fridges. There is a whirring sound over everything that’s all I can hear. The best friend is there, and two other men, the owner and The Boyfriend, and so am I. I’m looking at myself. We’re drinking and smoking cigarettes. We’re talking and laughing. Well, they are. I’m sitting on the ground, head wobbling against the back of the bar, eyelids opening and closing, not necessarily in unison. The men don’t seem to notice or worry. This feels wrong, out of space and time. I don’t know how I got here. Then the image fades.

My eyes struggle open again. What am I looking at? It’s just a fuzzy, blue cloud. Then I notice it’s not what I’m looking at, it’s what I’m looking through. A window. Filled with nothing but a dim blue light. Is it dawn? The window is far away, and, yet it’s all I can see. Why? It’s the big picture window of the restaurant. I lift my head to try and make out more of what’s around me. My body is still moving. I will my limbs to do anything at all. No response. It’s still not me moving my body. I’m lying on the floor of the restaurant, with my head rolling around on the ground like bowling ball.

Black again.

Now I feel the heavy weight of my head in my hands. I’m holding it up with my arm propped on the bar. With this new wave of consciousness comes a sharp ache and dizziness. Did my head just start to hurt this badly? Or is that why I came to? I can see again. I realize my eyes haven’t been closed. They’re just not looking at what they’re seeing.

Pay attention.

I see another figure. Just one this time, but we’re sitting facing each other behind the bar. Caught in the same yellow, neon glow. I’m smoking a cigarette. Or at least, I’m holding a lit cigarette. And I’m talking? What am I saying? I stop to listen and go dumb.  Too nervous to get the words out anymore. 

I regain some composure and look. I see the best friend. I see his mouth moving. I strain to make out what he’s saying. He’s so attracted to me? He’s not gonna tell The Boyfriend?

My eyes start to close again. Fuck. No. Pay attention.

He’s so not attracted to me? He’s gonna tell The Boyfriend?

Wait, didn’t he just say that?  No, not quite that. A memory. Or rather two. Of the same thing. This isn’t now. It’s before. Which one did he say? I lose the image to blackness as soon as I try to grasp it.

The ground is underneath me again. I run my hands across it like a kid making a snow angel (but instead in cigarette ashes). 

I can lift my head finally. I look. The light’s a dim blue again. Natural light now. Coming from the windows. But I can see enough around me to get a sensation in my stomach like being stabbed with an ice pick. My shirt is on, but my pants are off.  And between my legs is the best friend. I know what he’s doing but it feels the way shoes feel when your feet fall asleep, just a vague tingling sensation.

I try to lay my head back down gently, but it’s still a bowling ball I can only set down with broken fingers.  Gratefully, I only hear the thud; I don’t feel it.

More gooey dark nothing. And that static sound. Like inside a seashell.

Suddenly I’m on my feet. And fully clothed. Or getting dressed. Pay attention. Yes, I’m putting on my jacket right now. Why? Cause we have to go, he says, putting his hand on the small of my back and guiding me toward the door. Is he forcing me out? Do I not want to go? The Boyfriend’s been calling, he says. It’s time to go home.

I realize I’m looking at the best friend through some wine glasses on the shelf. It’s a mirror. I turn around to look at the real him. And I’m appalled to be staring directly into broad daylight. 

We’re outside now and I’m smothered by the fresh air. It’s a sunny morning with a few humans already scurrying about. So much reality out here, it’s oppressive. What happened inside then, in the night, was that real? It seems so different than this, walking quickly down the sidewalk so early in the morning, almost as though we were normal, responsible people. Could this and that both be true? I don’t stop to think about it. I just squint through the blinding daylight into my purse, which I only then realize I’m carrying, searching for and lighting a cigarette by muscle memory. I don’t think either of us is talking right now. Just walking side by side, me in my heels and him in his boots. My body feels possessed by his will. I’m only in it like a passenger. I marvel at my effortless double-time procession down the sidewalk at his behest, still with his hand ushering me along from behind. I watch the pavement pass underneath and take deep drags off the cigarette.  

Finally, we stop. I look up. We’re stopped because we’re there. My apartment. I make myself look at him. He’s saying something and smiling. Why is he smiling? What is he saying? Then I realize I’m smiling, too. And saying something back to him.  Thanks for walking me home?

He gives me another nudge and I start to put one foot in front of the other. My apartment building, my corner look so surreal, cast in a shadow not from the sun, but from another dimension. I’m crossing the street very slowly, I think. I didn’t even check to see there were no cars. Still too early for that. Besides, I don’t think I would have minded in the least getting hit by a car.

“Sarah!” Quickest I’ve moved all night. I stop to turn around and see where my name is coming from. I don’t know what I expected to see.

It’s the best friend, of course. Smiling very slyly and sort of winking. I returned the gesture almost identically, I think, and then suddenly feeling very euphoric turned back around and kept walking with a little skip in my step. Wait, are we flirting?

Keys?  Do I even have my keys?

I was no longer drunk. I was no longer in my body. I’m watching myself cross the street and approach my building.

The heavy wooden door of my building slams behind me and I don’t remember opening it. The clanging echo of my heels climbing the staircase reverberates in the empty stairwell and in my increasingly achy skull. I’m watching from atop the stairs as this poor girl leans heavily on the banister and lunges herself up step after step.

Black.

Suddenly I’m in the bedroom. I pull back the covers. The sheets are cold. No one’s slept in them. But only on my side of the bed. There’s stirring in the mound of covers next to me. That’s The Boyfriend scooting close to me. I take off my clothes and curl up to feel his warmth. He wraps his arms around me, pulls me close. He kisses me and gets on top of me. I realize I was trembling before but I’m not now. I never look at his face. Just the contours of his shoulders, his biceps. I can feel his skin, burning and soft. A trail of goosebumps follows in the wake I trace with my finger. I must be ice cold. His arms are all the way around me now and I swell with this feeling not of loving him, but of missing him. I’m paying full attention to every detail. Trying to memorize it. Saying goodbye to it.

The way his muscles tighten and relax around me. The smell of Irish Spring and whiskey sweat that’s always on him. The soft smoothness of his skin. His light brown freckles. The brush of his beard on my cheek. The way every inch of his body slunk perfectly into mine. We always said it was like we were cut out of one shape and fit back together. It was true. The convex of my tummy fitting right into the concave of his hips and pubic bone. 

He’s inside me right now and I close my eyes tight. I guess I’m trying not to cry. This feels… whole. Good. Right. Perfect. Complete. I dig my fingers into his back. I never look at his face.

Somehow, I fall asleep after we’re done. Underneath him. To this day I don’t know if either of us ever spoke a word. I just remember thinking that I never wanted to wake up.

A few hours later I sit up in a cold sweat. I immediately start to cry. I knew what happened. It wasn’t a weird dream. I had done the worst thing I could do. I slept with his best friend. The Boyfriend was already up and getting dressed. When I sat bolt upright, he asked what’s wrong with a little bit of fatigue already in his voice, like he was tired of asking me that. I struggled to get my mouth around the words. To get them out. But I told him.

He listened stoically, staring intensely into the ground. He didn’t say anything, but his lips pursed tightly together, and I could see his jaw grind gnashed teeth as he tried not to say anything. He put his fist through the wall next to the door. With his mangled fist he grabbed a shirt and with his good hand he slammed the bedroom door as he left.

I sat in the apartment all day completely sick, waiting for him to come home. I was guilt-ridden and anxious, but also hungover as hell. I laid in bed for as long as I could suffer myself thinking in silence, but finally hobbled uncomfortably to the couch to watch TV.

Hours later, he walked in. Drunk, happy. Relieved. Says he went to find the best friend, talked to him. He laughed and shook his head. It never happened. What? I asked. He kisses me on the forehead. Says it’s okay I got confused. My whole body goes cold from shock. I should be relieved, to be off the hook. But instead, I’m horrified. How could I have hallucinated all of that?

I want to go talk to the best friend, too. I’m baffled and, because I don’t have the sense to take the out I’ve just been given, a little frustrated. I went to the best friend’s other bar job where he worked checking ID’s at the door and as soon as I peer into his face, I can tell, it’s gone. Not that it didn’t happen, but that he put it away, somewhere deep inside. He’s kind and patient with me and acts completely flummoxed when I talk about it, taking gasps of air and trailing off instead of answering me, shrugging his shoulders with a disconcerting wry, little smirk on his face. He expels a cynical chuckle and shakes his head, saying “No, that didn’t happen,” but I can see in his eyes that he’s referencing the same mental picture I am when he says “that.”

From here on out, this creates a wedge between us, all of us. I inserted a wedge that The Boyfriend and I would never come back from, doubly so. I got blackout drunk with the best friend and did God-knows-what. And I continued to insist that this night did happen the way I remembered, and The Boyfriend and the best friend obstinately, happily tuned me out and ignored me. And because I couldn’t stop until my sabotage was complete, I wouldn’t let it go. For months I still brought it up to both of them. I begged The Boyfriend to believe me, the best friend to admit it. Eventually, it made The Boyfriend desperately sad. He pleaded with me to drop it, sobbing. To let it be a dream and move on, never speak of it again. And still, I wouldn’t.

It was completely maddening that these two would smile at me so patronizingly, so blissfully dismissive even just when I asked them to go over the events of the night as we three recalled them. The Boyfriend confirms he was one of the figures that I remember in the bar that night. And the owner was the other one. He says he came to take me home, but I wouldn’t go with him. The best friend tells him I’ll bring her back later, keep an eye on her. He insists nothing happened after that. But why was I there until dawn then when The Boyfriend says that he was there between 1 and 2 o’clock in the morning? The two of them sit side by side at the bar, satisfied grins smeared across their faces. They clink their glasses together, slam them against the tabletop, shoot back another drink. They are happy. They are fine.

But the buzzing static of those memories gnaws at me every day. How did I get on the floor? Did I fall? Did he lay me down there because I was so drunk? Was he as drunk as I was that night? What was he doing while I was passed out? It was that much harder to abandon my nagging questions since I was expected to believe that I manufactured the events of that night that didn’t match up with their accounts, and to accept that what didn’t feel right had no explanation or resolution. And they were content with me losing my mind. Maybe they preferred it. Admittedly, it was fucked up what the three of us were caught up in. Nobody had any good choices. And maybe it was all because of me. But we were supposed to love each other. We were supposed to be like family. The Boyfriend and I were engaged to be married at this point, and he and the best friend were like brothers. Why couldn’t we talk about what happened? Why wouldn’t they listen to me? Now it was me who was under the glass.

Trying to talk to The Boyfriend alone brought this anguish to his face. This abject desperation to disappear this topic of conversation. He would shake his head in defiance and try to order me to drop it. He was backed against this precipice, and if he surrendered to it, if he acknowledged what I claimed at all, he would go over and there would be no way back. I was sincerely baffled as to why he wouldn’t just face this, but I now realize that the best friend and I had made choices that took his away. He could only deny this forever or lose us both. Instead, he would just shake his head, staring through the floor, transfixed, willing with everything in him for it all to be different, for it to not be so.

The two of them had a simpler solution on hand: Sarah doesn’t know what’s real. When the events of that night strained credulity enough, when the possible truth seemed too unpleasant to bear, the Occam’s razor of our lives dictated that Sarah had imagined the whole thing. The best friend never really showed the haptics of someone who was lying as far as I could tell. But I knew from my own grooming that the only way to beat a lie detector was to believe the lie. And I knew the best friend. He was damaged like me; he was more than capable of lying to himself. The Boyfriend’s motivation was clear and much stronger than mine. And over the following months as I continued to petition them for reprieve, for acknowledgement, instead I watched him become comfortable with an inevitable consolation: that if he could not keep us both, he was okay with losing me. 

The Boyfriend and I were only together half a year after that night. After more than 10 years together off and on. The last couple years had, admittedly, become very ugly, very unhealthy, but this was the final nail in the coffin, I guess. I wasn’t consciously choosing myself over us. Hell, I have no idea what I was trying to achieve, persisting in haranguing them about it, even as the ways in which they ignored me became more and more violent. I naively believed I was trying to save us. Establish a foundation of honesty amidst all this rubble. But now when I look back, I was being entirely selfish. There was just this tiny, solid, stubborn, defiant piece of me that insisted… That insisted that my experience was real, my understanding of it was correct. My gut feeling that something was off was valid. That you couldn’t just twist my feelings and my perception up like a rusted folding chair and stick it in storage if it didn’t match the furniture.

In another fun, ironic twist, I truly started to break with reality after that. Lose longer and longer chunks of time. There were whole days that I could remember, but as a spectator, not in first person. I watched myself from the ceiling. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get back in my body. Well, that’s not entirely true. I could get back in, but the sensation of it was so acutely psychotic, so shameful, that it scared me. It expelled me; I couldn’t regain command of my own vessel. I did a lot more things I regretted during that time. When confronted with those things, now I lied and said I didn’t remember. I had no idea how to explain these prolonged out-of-body experiences, how to explain that I could be screaming at myself not to do a thing and forced to sit helplessly and watch as I did it anyway. Or explain how when I managed to will my psyche back into my body, it felt like it must feel to be clinging onto an electrified fence. My credibility became a pitiful, tattered thing. The Boyfriend and his friends regarded me as a shell, animated maniacally but less than human.

In the years that followed our breakup, I believed I’d had an epiphany or two. Reached an understanding of codependency. It was staggering because it was yet another addiction. Not to substances, but to a person. In my paradigm, I had this dichotomy of the broken person and the fixer. The broken person believes they can’t survive without the fixer, as much as they hate being tried to fix. And the fixer can’t admit helplessness in the face of the problems of the broken person. They’re sure that they can love some sense into the person if they just hang on a bit harder. That so-called revelation gave me some relief for a while. But even that understanding. I outgrew.

See, I was eager to make him the hero and me the villain. In my mind’s eye, it sure looked that way. Me the delirious ranting madwoman, always getting blackout drunk and caught up in some drama. Acting out. Hurting him. And him the stoic daily drinker, diligently performing his loyal boyfriend routine, steadfastly drama adjacent. But it’s not as simple as a dichotomy of one well person and one sick person in these codependent scenarios.

In reality, there are just two sick people. Two people whose opposing strategies for avoiding their own problems and acting out somewhere else complement one another’s perfectly, perhaps. But still just two sick people with their own demons that they can’t conquer or communicate to anyone else and with their own unique destructive attempts to cope. Like two lost puzzle pieces that you can pound to make fit together, but whose picture doesn’t make any sense.

This, more sober estimation has actually made it a lot harder for me to forgive. It’s no wonder that, as human beings, we so pathologically avoid the truth. While it makes facts much simpler, the feelings that follow in their wake are exponentially more complex and difficult. For a long time, I saw my actions in my relationship with The Boyfriend as self-sabotaging, provoked by an allergy to peace, to happiness. Now I wonder if the part of me that was destructive was the only part fighting for my wellbeing the whole time. This persistent little nagging intuition saying, ‘If you don’t end this, you will never, ever be well.’

And all that time that they and I willfully pursued our grudge match over disparate versions of events that night, we were hung up on entirely the wrong issue. We were nerve-wracked because it would’ve been cheating. No one, not even I, stopped for a moment to think that it could’ve been rape. In fact, it wasn’t only with the best friend that one night that I woke up in the dark with some stranger on top of me, my body jostling, my head reeling from the ache of intoxicants and the effort to recognize my surroundings or recall the last things I could remember. I beat myself up so intensely, day in and day out, for stumbling around in a drug-addled haze through a party scene riddled with unburdened young men looking for semi-conscious pussy to use as a temporary stress relief, which they could do as easily as grabbing another beer from the fridge. All those nights I lost sleep over my lack of faithfulness to The Boyfriend. Neither he nor I ever seemed troubled over an obvious lack of consent on my part and a disturbingly absent sense of responsibility on theirs. The circumstances of women who abandoned themselves eagerly and were very easily discredited suited them just fine. That was never the issue at all.

It wasn’t even me that finally held the line and called it over. He, eventually, got fatigued enough to stand his ground. I remember the last time I would ever see him, pulling up to his apartment that gray winter morning to pick up my dog. He stood at a distance with his arms folded. He wouldn’t touch me. He would hardly look at me or speak. All the ways I used to hook him and seduce him, they fell flat. Inside it felt like I was drowning, flailing, so scared was I to try and live without him. My heart, all the strength in my muscles, just sank, like one of those wooden dolls with string joints that collapses when you take your finger off the button on the platform. 

It took me years before I would be grateful for it, the boundary he made that day. Years before he would not be the hero in my story anymore, nor me the evil witch. Years to stop spinning it one way or the other and simply reconcile that he was a person whom I loved very much, and that I lost without it amounting necessarily to anything at all. And that he was as deeply flawed as I was, not more or less so. That if one day I could be redeemed and deserving of health and happiness, then so was he. And if he was deserving of peace and forgiveness, then so was I. And that if he ever had any power to save me at all, it wasn’t in hanging on to me all those years.

It was in finally letting me go.