L

ife has a certain quality or property quite inimical to fiction. It is shapeless, it does not point to and gather round anything, it does not cohere. Artistically, it’s dead. Life’s dead.

 

Only artistically that is. In down-to-earth realist and material terms, of course, life is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and has everything to be said for it. But then life ends, while art persists for at least a little while longer.—Martin Amis, Inside Story, page xix

The annual end of June and start of July is a calendrical territory laden for me with reflective moods and a bit of wonder at how I am still here at all. Twelve years ago at this time, one chapter in my life concluded and the next one opened, except I was unaware of this on July 15, 2010.

I was in the shapelessness of my life, of life itself, and whatever narrative powers I may have summoned to give it shape had long been dormant. I drank on July 15 and I did not drink on July 16. In my memory of this moment, this may as well be represented with the sound of a door slammed shut—or slammed open, to be more correct, as life, my life, has opened with possibilities ever since—but in the experience of the moment, there was no difference between the two days.

My last drinks were of the quietly desperate sort: Because I was unemployed and had no money to my name, I had no full bottles of alcohol in the room I rented back then. I also did not have any food. The evening of July 15 was spent in a dig through a garbage bag of “empties” in the hope that a shot glass or two might be filled with the drips and drops that empties sometimes yield. Like water from a sponge that isn’t a sponge at all.
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