On the Wing and Prayer

Strange days are here again.

Seven years. That was the line I carried like armor.

Seven years sober. Seven years of saying “no,” of keeping myself tethered when everything in me wanted to cut loose and drift.

And then—Monday night into Tuesday morning—I broke it.

I told my wife I just wanted to buy a little bottle of whiskey, just to taste and spit it out. I knew before the lie left my lips that it was exactly that: a lie. I bought it. I paid for it. I cracked it open. I drank it. No excuses. No scapegoats. My hands on the bottle, my choice in the moment.

And yet—life had been pressing down on me like a collapsing roof. The world itself is noise and fire: politics tearing at the edges of sanity, a culture fed on rage and fear, people I trusted fading away or using me until nothing was left. Add heartbreak, abandonment, the quiet cruelty of feeling disposable, and a job that never stops demanding pieces of me—it stacked up like bricks on my chest.

So I reached for the old escape hatch. Whiskey.

I don’t want sympathy. What I’m going through is so small compared to the vast suffering out there. There are people losing children, people living through bombs and starvation, people being chewed up by systems far colder than a bottle. My relapse is a pinprick on the map of human agony.

But it still matters to me. It still hurts.

Because I can see what the world is becoming—how so many hollow themselves out, filled with hate, fear, and nihilism until there’s nothing left but shells that scream. And I’ve spent years clinging to the few lights left in that darkness. The people who still choose care, still choose compassion, still fight for hope.

This week, those lights kept me alive.

That’s the difference. When I was drinking years ago, I had nobody. My parents couldn’t carry me, and I couldn’t carry myself. But this time, I reached out. And people answered. They reminded me that I am not entirely alone. That’s the only reason I didn’t buy more the next day, the only reason I didn’t spiral all the way back into the abyss.

And here’s the cruelest part: the whiskey worked. It gave me what I wanted. It numbed the noise, softened the edges of the grief, gave me a breath of quiet in a storm that hasn’t let up. It “helped.” And that’s what makes it dangerous, and what makes it hurt the most. Because I still want that silence.

But I also know the silence isn’t real. It’s a trap. It isn’t healing, it’s hollowing. I can’t let myself vanish into it. I can’t carve myself down to a ghost just because I’m afraid to sit with pain.

So I will sit with it. I will grieve. I will feel the heartbreak, the anger, the fear. I will let it wash through me, not away from me. Because the only way forward is through.

So today is day one again. Not year seven. Day one. And both truths live in me at once: pride that I made it as far as I did, shame that I fell, and the stubborn refusal to give up now.

I don’t know if I’ll stumble again.

Maybe I will.

But I know I’ll get back up. I know I’ll keep moving forward, one step, one breath, one day at a time.

But God, am I thirsty.