Hope?

I argued with C tonight about his coldness towards me.  I told him that I would do everything in my power to be the wife and woman that he fell in love with but that it takes two to make a marriage work.  I have been am emotional wreck throughout this week and a half and this journey is just beginning and will get harder before it gets easier. 

This weekend is a huge test of our relationship.  My reunion and our town festival are this weekend and there will be copious drinking at both that I will have to avoid to keep my faltering marriage in check.  I know that I can do this and I look forward to proving that to him, but he will be drunk all weekend and this will be hard for me.  Why do the happy drunks have all the fun?  How sick is it that I envy his addiction because it is more functional than my own?  I think that it is a testament to the struggle that is this disease that I look at him with jealousy since he will get to drink longer in life before he hits rock bottom.  I should be happy that I am saving my liver and relationships now and somehow avoided being thrown in jail or divorced (so far) and yet I look at him with longing. 

I will miss the drunken laughter between us, the sloppy kisses like teenagers out at the bar and the crazy knock-your-clothes off wake-up-with-bruises sex that comes with two people being that perfect level of drunk when you are both uninhibited yet funtional enough to get the deed done well.  Drunk sex sucks with one sober person.  I will miss sitting in our truck in the garage sappily belting out Journey and love songs while looking into each other's eyes. 

What I won't miss?  The aftermath.  Waking up at five in the morning feeling my heart race and skip beats because I am so dehydrated that it literally is having trouble functioning.  Cracking one eye open and not darking to look sideways because that will bring on the splitting headache right behind the eye socket.  The headache that brings the nausea and wretching up the stomach acid in an effort to stop the pounding.  My eyes and lips so dry that when i finally get dressed I wear eye shadow and lipstick to cover the circles and the chapped colored lips.  The purple spots sprinkled across my eyelids from thowing up.  My hands shaking voilently and the inability to go back to sleep to make it somehow better.  Struggling to appear normal - getting up and sneaking advil and downing water all while letting the dogs out and attempting to fool my husband into thinking he was wrong and that I was not that drunk the night before afterall.  To make him eat his words.  My heart seems to jump out of my chest when I remember the fight the night before and I struggle to remember how it started.  It doesn't matter that I can't remember or who started what.  All I know is that the night is in pieces and the ones that I can see in snapshots are of me screaming horrible things, getting in C's face, him throwing a stool (probably to avoid doing the same to me) and the look on his face when I say that perfect cutting remark that causes him to storm off.  Sometimes I am crying, sometimes I am mad when he leaves.  I somehow end up passing out and waiting for the horrible day after when my hell starts over.  That is what I hate and that outweighs every drunken singalong or sexcapade.  This is the reality of alcohol and what it does to people - their bodies, their minds and their relationships with everything and anyone around them.  Alcohol is poison and I want it out of my life.  I pray that I am strong enough to set myself free.