Once our divorce was final, Mara seemed to have finally given up on the idea that she could somehow move back to Dallas and live with me as a roommate.  Either that, or she simply found herself too involved with the life she was trying to build in Florida to think of escape any longer.  A few of the details of the events of the time remain fuzzy in my brain, which is partially because so much drama was going on with Mara, and partially because of how heavily I was drinking during this period.

Of any time in my life, this was the only time I found that I was drinking more than I actually planned to.  And that did bother me; it seemed to be a true lack of control.  In other eras, I didn’t drink at all (either because I was using drugs, or because I didn’t want to use anything at all), or I drank when I felt the urge.  If I drank enough to actually be inebriated, it was usually by design.  I’d think to myself “I want to get smashed tonight” and I’d go ahead and do it, enjoying both the sort of out-of-body experience a spinning room would have on me, and the temporary peace in my brain when the guilt and regrets and misery were overwhelmed by the deadening power of alcohol. 

The failure and guilt I felt about Mara and the marriage (although in my mind the whole relationship was all-encompassing; the part where we were not married was no different) ate away at me daily.  My on-again-off-again relationship with my girlfriend was doing nothing but making me feel even more desolate, yet I was unable to break free of it.  Every time we’d call it quits, she’d want to be friends again, which would soon lead to sex, and then an unannounced resumption of the relationship.  My career was dead, my new job was terribly stressful (and did not pay very much), I had lost my health insurance (and with that dropped any prescription medication I was on), I had a really bad tooth which I knew would eventually develop an abscess, I was living in a shitty apartment where my living room had no furniture…and nothing I was doing seemed to be with the future in mind.  Looking back, I realize I wasn’t really thinking about the future, or even admitting I was going to have one. 

Still, my excessive drinking was really bugging me.  It’s one thing to decide to get drunk.  It’s another thing altogether to go to the bar and order a burger and a dark beer, and wind up drinking six of them.  Twice during this period I actually got sick off of alcohol, which is something I had only done once in my life before (and that was after drinking six Tom Collins and six lemon drop shots on an empty stomach in a 60 minute span).  But here I found myself overdrinking – unintentionally or at least without planning – and vomiting afterwards, while passed out or nearly unconscious.  That scared me, when I was sober.  The last thing I wanted to do was die choking on my own vomit in a drunken stupor.  Or, scarier, maybe that was what I wanted…maybe my attempts at self-destruction were getting more and more overt.  Fear of death had long been the main reason I’d never made a serious suicide attempt, despite all the times in my life I’d thought about it, considered it, or even planned it. 

Perhaps at a different time, or without the knowledge I had then, I would have continued to drink like that until I never woke up.  But Mara’s suicide attempt had solidified in my mind the fact that I never wanted to lay the kind of guilt on someone that suicide had added to my already horrendous burden.  I could picture my Dad sitting by himself, crying, blaming himself for the way my life had turned out, and the terrible way it ended.  I wasn’t about to let that happen.  So I decided I needed to think about the future; I had to turn things around, even though I already had the possibility of a criminal conviction and time in prison hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles.  I needed to find things to look forward to.

The stream of nightmarish drama that flowed to me from Mara wasn’t helping things any.  She and a female friend from the hospital had gotten an apartment together, but the roommate was a habitual drug user.  When she owed money to drug dealers, they took it upon themselves to take what they wanted from the apartment, whether it belonged to the user or to Mara.  So a few times I’d get crying phone calls about how her stereo or television, or some of her CD’s, had been appropriated by random seedy people.  Clearly this was not an environment Mara was going to able to survive for long.  Plus, with how depressing that life was, I am pretty sure she was spending a good deal of her own money on marijuana…something she wouldn’t have admitted to me.  With all the psychiatric drugs Mara was taking, and with her limited income from disability (plus whatever modest sum I was able to give her when I could afford it), wasting money on pot was idiocy.  But Mara did feel close enough to me, and that I was capable of listening without judgment to most things,  to let me know that whenever she found herself running short of rent money, she was able to pick up $50 here or there from other tenants in the building or neighborhood by making herself available to them sexually.  I never asked for more details; it wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to know.  But somehow the physical distance between us allowed me to avoid laying the blame for some actions – such as those – on my own shoulders.  This was a life she was creating for herself without my enabling.  I could hope for better, and offer advice and support, but I knew I could not save her.  That was a great relief to realize.  True, I hadn’t forgiven myself for being unable to save her from herself in the past, but for the first time since I was 16 years old I was no longer taking the martyr position, or assuming the role of savior.  If Mara was going to head along this downward spiral, I’d try to help, but there wasn’t much I could do.