"At least when you were drinking you were fun! What have you got now? What are you going to do with yourself?" I keep hearing this over and over again as I lay awake at night. I can picture the confused look on her face when Erin, Queen of the Bar flies, called me last February. I had been gone for nearly a month and she had just noticed I was missing. "There are many things I want to do now, I'm thinking about going back to school." I promised to call her when I made it back to the city, but I knew wasn't going back. I couldn't go back there and be that person again. That fall she and I had been close in our misery spending many evenings lamenting our losses and doing our best to empty every bottle of liquor in the city in an ill guided attempt to locate them. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I answered back knowing very well what it was she meant. She'd seen me without the hazy shield of alcohol. She knew very well the anxious, nail biting, anti-social kid I really was and it was a sharp contrast to the fast talking smart ass occupying his normal seat in that Brighton bar cursing at a Baseball game. I was furious I could feel the terrible things I wanted to say to her welling up in my gut ready to pierce the very same hazy shield she was hiding behind. "I've got to run, I've got some things I've got to do...take care of yourself huh?". I hung up the phone and sat at my desk with my head in my hands for what could have been hours. What was I going to do with myself now? I guess I hadn't really gotten that far in this grand plan. My mind had been too occupied with the detoxing and the sickness and the wave of true real feeling that came over me in those first days of clarity. The feeling I got from the warmth of a pint had suddenly been ripped from me and I knew eventually I would have to find something or someone to fill that void.