My AA sponsor is not very chill. She “works a hard program to lead an easy life.” She tells me my ego is not my amigo. She likes to remind me at least once a day that my disease wants me dead. I’m sure it does, and I wish she would find something else to talk about. Recently she told me I needed to join SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) because I romanticize and objectify every person I meet. I didn’t agree.
And then a man I hadn’t spoken to in twelve years slid into my DMs. He is the brother of a guy who didn’t want to be my friend in college. The guy didn’t want to be my friend because I’d spent my entire sophomore year romanticizing and objectifying him. His brother stayed with him on campus one weekend, and I started romanticizing and objectifying him, too (our college campus had a very limited number of straight men). I met the brother on the lawn outside a house party. By that point in the night, I’d had six Keystone Lights, peed in my pants, chased a skunk, run away from my friends, and lost my Nokia flip phone somewhere in between. I’m pretty sure I had chlamydia at the time.
I asked the brother to help me find my phone, and he did. I saw our life together flash before my eyes. After that we texted once or twice and became friends on Facebook. A few years later, I saw him at an apartment party in Brooklyn. We were hungry and went to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Myrtle Avenue and Broadway. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I ordered a bacon egg and cheese croissant, a blueberry muffin, and a large iced coffee with several pumps of cream and liquid sugar. We brought the iced coffee back to the party, poured vodka in it, and passed it around.
He lives in Montana now, on his family’s farm. I don’t know what they do on it. I don’t know what happens in Montana. In the DM, he asked if I wanted to do a “writers’ retreat” on the farm. We hadn’t really spoken in twelve years, but I said yes because I was living with my parents at the time and wanted to get away from them. I also wanted to get married soon. I asked the girlfriend group chat if going to stay with this guy on his farm was a bad idea, and they all said it was. They told me not to go, and I said I wouldn’t.
On the plane to Montana, I thought, everyone is so stupid, he can’t murder me because we have mutual friends on Instagram. Then I started thinking about a movie I’d seen recently where the heroine meets a charming man in a grocery store who seems pretty trustworthy until he takes her to his cannibal farm. She gets away, but not before he cuts her ass off — literally sodders her ass cheeks and cuts them off. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like I was walking into a perfectly laid heinous crime, one that some ladies my age would probably make a podcast episode about. Now this is what we call rock bottom, my sponsor’s voice said.
When the plane landed in Montana, I called my sponsor. “You were right,” I said to her voicemail recording. “I do need SLAA.” I was glad she hadn’t picked up.
