Birthday Blues

What they don’t tell you about celebrating your sobriety date is that it has a strange tendency to coincide with the anniversary of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.

There is a me from before it happened and a me from after.

And when I look at her I feel a tremendous sense of guilt.

Because I didn’t save her.

I couldn’t save her.

She needed me and I wasn’t there.

In every other universe, I died that day.

In every other universe, my father came home from work 5 minutes later and five minutes later was too late.

In every other universe, my father came home to a corpse.

By most accounts, I shouldn’t be alive today.

By the rest, it’s a miracle that I’m alive today.

And sometimes, when I tell people about this, they ask what I’m doing with my second chance at life.

And that’s just about the cruelest question I can imagine asking someone who was nearly killed in their pursuit of a memoir-worthy life.