Tequila makes her thoughts fall off...

Four a.m. used to be my favorite time of the day to write. A senior thesis novella, an overdue sonnet, or just really, really bad poetry. I didn't drink then, so I couldn't blame it on the Cuervo. The city was quiet, especially if it was snowing in Kenmore Square, and all of the bars had let out and there were few taxis and fewer cars and I'd be thick with thought. The street lamps dim and the Mass Pike calm and only the glow of the Citgo sign flashing red and blue through my bedroom window. I wrote some pretty shitty stuff then... and I still probably do now... but at least tonight I can blame it on the Cuervo.

I'm awake because I can feel the tequila swimming in my stomach. Too many margaritas over dinner with my family... so potent that I can remember ordering food and maybe eating some of it but not quite sure if I tasted it. Even writing about it right now makes me a little queasy.

But it's four a.m., and I couldn't sleep. Usually I get up and take a steaming hot shower and crawl back into a cold bed and that always seems to knock the liquor right out of my system. But I am in Atlanta for the holiday weekend, visiting my brother and his wife and her new baby bump that I like to call peanut. So I am trying not to wake up the house and a radio-active second trimester pregnant woman.

Sitting in this office, typing on a laptop, a fog of memory begins to rise around me. It's the things I have somehow managed to push away -- but coming back to this place, typing in this dusky yellow-lit space, it's hard not to feel crowded by unbalanced emotion. Flashes of utter and total defeat, disparage, disallusionment; passing half-lights of hope. Hollowed, food didn't even have love anymore, and I was self-medicating on over the counter sleeping pills. Still I was brave, I laughed often, I cooked wonderful meals a few nights a week for two busy lawyers who never ate at home. I freelanced from coffee shops, like the patchouli-reeking artsy folks behind the windows in Expresso Royale I'd pass on the way to my first 9-5.

During my stay, I had come down with such a bad virus that I lay on the cold granite tiled bathroom, thick with fever, unable to stop throwing up -- but I didn't care, something about it felt so cathartic that it wasn't until I almost passed out that I called my brother to come rescue me. It was almost as if I was punishing myself intentionally, putting my heart through an emotional bootcamp.

In the short three months I spent here, flopping fish out of water, this place saved me. I've known it all along. It's been the foundation of this new start. I've whispered it to girlfriends in corners at gatherings where I've been leaning against the two-hundred pound elephant in the room, feeding him cocktails. This city was the best thing that ever happened to me. It's apparent now, being back here... I'm finally through the dark tunnel... standing tall, naked with cellulite, in bright blazing sunshine.