Monday night, after the vigil at the funeral home, I went out to eat. It was very late and I was starving. Mexican food is my comfort food, yuuum, beans and sourcream and cheese enchildas with guacamole. It has been my comfort food for over 30 years. And before I got sober, it was my comfort drink. Tequila, margarita’s on the rocks.

And as I was sitting down in my booth on Monday night, that sneaky bastard Denial said, “order a margarita, it would taste so very good right now and you’re just tired of feeling so much pain.”

Two weeks earlier I wanted to kill the pain too.

And this? Just scared the crap out of me. I have always understood in my sobriety that thoughts like this are normal for an alcoholic. It doesn’t mean that I am not sober or that I’m not in recovery. It means that the thought of a drink, and in my case a drug too, is the normal thought to have when the chips are down or for no good reason at all. What isn’t normal is not acting on that thought. So normally when thoughts like that creep into my head I say “thanks for the reminder that you’re still there you big spider, go away” and keep on trucking.

I’m reminded of a short scene in the movie Circle of Friends when the main female character goes to confession and she confesses that she’s had lustful thoughts. The priest asks her, “Did you entertain those thoughts?”

On Monday night when I heard that smooth talker I entertained those thoughts. I even danced a very short jig with those thoughts. And I realized that this period has been the hardest of my sobriety for me personally. When my brother relapsed and it nearly killed him it was a very difficult time. This is different. This is more personal.

See, I thought I had true love. I thought had found the one. And The One rejected me, was not faithful to me in his heart, and dishonored me. I tried to bring that around to something else and couldn’t. He told me he couldn’t bear not to have me in his life as his friend. And he can’t do that either. What I really lost was The Dream. But I would have liked to be friends.

I’m trying very hard to dream again, to create now what I really want in my future. But sometimes the sadness just overwhelms me. I lost something I valued very highly and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m completely powerless to do anything except put one foot in front of the other and have faith that this was a very good thing to go through and that what is coming next is better than the last dream.

But sometimes I just can’t see it.