Something happened between the time when not so long ago I knew her well, well like I recognized her and we had conversations that went back and forth, when she could take any challenge in stride and wrap it into laughter that would break through the dark and rise above the audience that clung to her humor. Somewhere between that and now, when she looks out at us and responds to a conversation we're not having, or wilts into her drink at any sign of direct focus.
How do you put your hand around a familiar form when you can't recognize her voiced words any longer? How does it become something you face on a simple night of dinner with friends?
How do you get to a point that you monitor the drinks?
It leaches out from something that is hers to something that is ours. It's behavior and voice. It's her body and her eyes. It's alcohol.
She's been here for five minutes and her eyelids droop, her voice slurs. Where has she been before now? What has she had to drink. We ask. She dodges.
I watch my friends. She's draining the energy from the table. It's familiar, this try of patience. It's not fun, her behavior. It's concerning. She's in trouble; we're in trouble. Frustration leads to anger and compassion limps along side. Having the energy to face this carves into responsibility, meaning it cuts to the bone.
I can't take it anymore. Not the looks, not the behavior, and not the discomfort. I take this into my hands and ask her (in a way that gives her no option) to let me take her home. She doesn't argue at the table but she questions at the valet stand.
Because you NEED to go home.
It's all I can say.
In the car, I glance over at her and sigh. I wonder who needs the armor, me or her. I think her. But that's graceful. At the red light, her head drops low. Silence.
I get her home, walk her in. She slurs her anger. It's loose and frightened. It's they and them. It's that she won't face herself and refuses to face them. She's caught between knowing and facing.
Yet she admits she understands the concern. She talks to me, says to me that she understands.
Returning to the restaurant, I recall that before I walked her out I was told to tell all when I returned. Are drunk words really worth keeping? I wonder where allegiance sleeps. Here we go again - the familiar need to apologize when the apology is not mine. Everyone at this table feels a version of it.
I sit down and can't shake that I've been here before. Enough times to make the familiarity boring. The taking responsibility, the removing and the driving. The returning. The questions and the secrets. The need to understand and the need to roll my eyes because I'm so tired of this particular familiar, no matter whose face. The burn of the spotlight on someone whose problems make more noise than your own, on someone whose problems are as clear and damaging, yet tolerated again and again until it's common and blurry and way past time to address.
A cry out is just that but sometimes it's never that. Sometimes it's found between her voice and our patience. She doesn't know that she's crying out. But she is. And we're crying out but pointing it at her. The battle is formed on the heart's concern.
It's not an ambush but she reads this blog. I want her to recognize herself.
I'm talking to you now. Take a step and get some help. You need saving but we can't do it. You have to save you. It's not an attack, it's a hug. A rough hug, I admit, but it is a hug nonetheless. We'll be here when you go though it, and we'll be here when it's over. That's a promise.
Seriously, it's time. Get some help.
