I began packing up my things and shipping them back to Texas in installments. I painted the walls of my apartment back to their original white. I binged on Marc Maron interviews, five or six in a row, which were like instructional tapes on how to talk to people. Maron had been sober for years. He was open about himself, and in return, his guests would open up about themselves. The discussions that unfolded were riveting, evidence that two people, anywhere, can find common ground. I liked reminding myself what an honest conversation sounded like.
That’s what I wanted. An honest conversation. Not one where my mouth turned into a geyser of random confessions—my bra fits funny, and I once boned that bartender—but a conversation in which those superficial details faded away and we dared to tell the truth about our own suffering. This was the closeness I had always been drinking toward. I drank for other reasons, so many other reasons, but closeness was the richest reward. The part where we locked in on each other, and one person sifted out the contradictions of who they were and how they got there, and the other person just… listened.
I’m not sure when I stopped listening. Somehow it became my duty to entertain the masses. To be always on. I stopped being someone who talked with their friends and I started talking at them. Amusing anecdotes, rants deployed on cue. I wasn’t the only one. We were all out there on our social media stages with clever quips and jazz hands. This was not a cultural moment that rewarded quiet contemplation. A colleague once described our media job like this: “News happened. Are you pro or con?” Not “News happened—and should we discuss it?” But pick a side. She who judges first wins the Google searches.
Heavy drinkers are also dreadful listeners, because they are consumed with their next fix. They nod, and smile, but an inquisition is unfolding inside. How much booze is left? Would anyone care if I got another round? What time does the liquor store close?
I was trying to stay quiet for a while. Watching, reading, observing. I forgot what an introvert I could be. I had drowned that shy little girl in so many 12-packs that whenever she emerged, nervous and twitching, I was nearly choked with shame. But long before I became an attention hog who yelled about orgasms, I was a child terrified the teacher would call on me, and I needed to accept both extremes in myself so I might find some middle ground. “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Joan Didion wrote. “Otherwise they turn up unannounced.”
A week before I moved back to Texas, Stephanie and I had dinner. I hadn’t seen her much. She’d spent most of the year in Los Angeles, where her husband was filming a television show and where she was auditioning for roles she didn’t get, and didn’t tell me about, because it was easier that way.
She asked me how I’d been, and I said scared. I asked how she’d been, and she said lonely.
After dinner, we walked through the quaint West Village streets where I came each weekend to shake loose my solitude. She’d had a few hard years, and I hadn’t even noticed it. How is it possible to be good friends with a person and miss so much? But Stephanie had such early career success that, in my mind, it could only continue. Yes, being an actress over 35 was rough, and yes, rejection sucked, but she was Stephanie. My forever dream girl. Everything always worked out for her.
If you scratch the surface on anyone’s life, you find ache and pain. I don’t care who they are. They can be the Queen of England. (Especially if they are the Queen of England.) I’d been so busy envying Stephanie, trying to compete with her glow, that I stopped seeing her. I didn’t notice the times she reached out for me. “I need you back,” she once told me after too many saketinis, and I thought: Wait. Where the hell did I go?
More than a year had passed since that night. After dinner, I brought her to the bench looking out across the water to New Jersey, and she sat beside me, and we didn’t say much.
“I could not have made it in this city without you,” I said. She waved my words away before the tears had any chance. Stephanie doesn’t like these speeches. “Stop it. We’ll be just as close,” she said, and she was right.
The next week, a year to the day I got sober, I moved back to Dallas, the city where Stephanie and I once sat in a chain restaurant, promising each other we would escape to New York.
I found a crooked little carriage house, with leafy trees all around, where I made French press coffee, just like Stephanie made when I first visited her in New York. I hung the Japanese robe I first saw her wear, and I bought aviator sunglasses like the ones she had. And I smiled at all the many ways she has shown me what I hope to be in this world.
RIGHT BEFORE MOVING, I sent out an “I’m coming back!” email to my friends in Dallas. The premise was to ask if anyone had housing tips, but the real intent was to drum up enthusiasm about my return. I waited for the exclamation marks and all-caps emails to fill my in-box. A handful of people responded. Otherwise, I was greeted by the sound of wind whistling through an empty canyon.