I got lucky. My health failed. I needed heart surgery.
Did you hear me say I was lucky?
That’s maybe the only thing I know for sure in the muddy morality of planet Earth: If you get sober at 33, you are incredibly lucky, even with the heart surgery. Yes, I torched a first marriage, and I have to live knowing it was my fault. In rehab, though, I sat around people in their 50s and 60s, disasters tattooed on their faces, a whole army of aches scattered around them. People whose children detested them, and not a day goes by that I don’t recognize the splendor in Ava’s never knowing that part of me. Forget scuba diving with Rushdie; my only remaining goal in life is to never let Ava meet the madman who squats in my heart, hoping I’ll indulge his awful appetites.
I’m 40 now, clean for seven years. I got so lucky, in fact, that I get to sit here with toothpaste on my face, sprawled on the bathroom floor in a whole new way, in the best way.
She is done with her business and stands up, wildly batting at the toilet paper, so it’s streaming all over the floor. I wish you could see her. I wish you could watch the toilet paper fly. My second wife, with whom I work daily to destroy any new walls of disappointment, would wander in and flop down next to me, and we’d watch Ava in awe. I mean, she’d make me collect every last shred of toilet paper later, but she’d co-sign this overindulgence.
Ava keeps spinning the roll, keeps laughing, and the whole bathroom floor is covered in a layer of toilet paper like fresh snow. Read the rest of this essay by Joshua Mohr
Comments (1)