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She nods into my shoulder. "I'm still sorry. That's hard."
"Yeah. I always knew it in my bones, but I didn't really think about it until I was older."
"Until you were partying?" she asks.
"Yeah. At first, I thought, wow, is this really what Dad let get in front of our family? Of course, it wasn't. He was in NA, not AA. He's totally sober now, but alcohol was never his preferred fix."
"Is it yours?" she asks with only curiosity, but the words still land with a thud. She's so clear and matter-of-fact. Straight to the point.
I appreciate it. I need it. It's too easy to paper over everything with bullshit. "Yeah. It took a while, but one day it just clicked. I was upset about something. I don't even remember what. And I kept drinking at a party and that pain faded into that soft, warm numb, and I got it. This is why Dad threw away everything, all those times. Because he needed the pain to stop and it was so fucking easy to pick up a bottle."
"Did you think about it that way?"
"Sometimes," I admit. "Mostly, it felt inevitable. Everyone looked at me like a ticking time bomb. They were sure I was on the path to rock bottom. I might as well enjoy it. Feel something else for a while."
"Do you think that was most of it? The expectation?" she asks.
"Fuck, Cass, can't you start with a softball?"
Her laugh breaks the tension in the room. "No. I don't do softballs." She runs her thumb over the outside of my hand. "But it's okay if you don't know."
"I think it was everything. Genetics, expectations, opportunity. There was no one moment when I suddenly became an alcoholic. It was a little every day. And, some days, it was better. I was better. I drank less. Hell, when I took Daphne to the East Coast for college tours, I didn't drink at all. It was only a week and a half, but it was a long time for me."
She doesn't judge. She just nods.
"I guess that should have been a sign, that I counted ten days without alcohol as a major accomplishment. But I didn't see it. I didn't want to see it. I knew I drank too much, but I figured I could stop anytime."
"When was that?" she asks.
"Off and on, since I was seventeen, eighteen maybe. I had good days, weeks, months, even. Then I was back into it."
"What did the good days have in common?" she asks.
"Music," I say. "When I could find that, it was the only thing that felt stable."
"Only music?"
"Mostly," I say. "Other distractions worked too. Anything that filled my mind, so I didn't have to sit with my thoughts."
"I know what you mean."
"You do?" It's hard to imagine Cassie struggling to sit with her thoughts. She's the most introspective person I know.
She nods. "When I was depressed, before I started treatment, I would stay up late, playing rounds of solitaire again and again, until I was too tired to think. Because I didn't want to lie down and be with my thoughts."
"When was that?"
"A few different times," she says. "It got really bad my senior year of high school. Therapy helped that time. But the next time, it didn't. I needed medication. But I hated the medication. It gave me headaches and killed my libido." She bites her lip. "I swear I'm not trying to bring it back to sex."
"I know."
"Or to steal the spotlight."
"You're not." I run my thumb over the outside of her hand. "When was that?"
"College. Junior year. I went off the medication for a while. I swore off it for a while. I didn't want to lose that part of myself again. But then things got too bad. Whenever I let out my thoughts, to write a song, I wrote something miserable and angry, and I didn't feel better. I felt worse. So I went back and…"
"Then you started dating Frederick and you didn't get to enjoy the new relationship energy?" I relay the story she told me earlier.
"Yeah. I switched to a different class a few years ago. That helped."
"Helped you come?"
She laughs. "You don't have to spell it out."
"Are we spelling it with an o or a u?"
"Ew, gross. An o. Always an o. A u is trashy." She laughs. "And, yes, it brought back my libido. It brought back other parts of me that felt muted, but it still raised the lows. It was better. A lot better. I finally found a doctor who listened to me. The others… they always insisted the drugs didn't have serious side effects. That I was somehow unusual for hating them."
"That's fucked."
She nods. "Do you think that's it?" she asks. "With you? Do you think it's depression?"
"That I was self-medicating?" I ask. "I don't know. Maybe that's how it started. But once I was drinking all the time, I felt like a fuckup because I was drinking all the time, and I drank to forget that feeling."
