Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

It will have dawned on me that there are women in the world who can have a glass of wine without craving the whole bottle. That some women even leave wine in the glass, a concept as alien to me as eating half an Oreo.

We can’t afford to live lives we have to fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating.

Women get named after nature, but it’s rarely named after us.

GU packet.

AFTER MARY OLIVER

SIX-DOLLAR CHIANTI,

falernum?

Marsanne

Paul Westerberg

And all my new supplies would go into the linen closet among the sheets and beach towels, to the shelf reserved for optimistic variations of myself that rarely surfaced.

Because I didn’t want to stop drinking. I wanted to stop wanting to drink. Because then the stopping itself would be as easy as avoiding spin class or olives or pointy-toed shoes or Ryan Reynolds movies or anything else I didn’t like.

But the difference was that I’d been trying to kill the want. And now I was just saying no to it.

My eventual sobriety, which I’d imagined would feel like a lifelong panic attack, turned out to be more like ripping off a giant Band-Aid: a moment of searing pain followed by wonder that I’d ever thought I needed that much protection.

And it felt futile. The notion of stacking up sober day after sober day until the occasion of my funeral felt fucking pointless. All that effort, just to die. I didn’t know then that eventually I’d stop stacking days. That I’d just be living a life. That I wouldn’t have to pay close attention to every root and rock on the path in front of me. That I’d be sure-footed enough to also notice the trees and the wind and even the occasional owl and to realize that both time and space were far denser than I ever knew.

Michael Stipe.

“You are perilously close to having the life you’ve always wanted,” she says. “It’s not surprising to me that you would panic.”

Pick’s disease,”

Neil Finn.

Mark Eitzel

Terry Gross

poppers.

Nagel.

AeroPress,

desire lines,

It’s just that the scope of the company’s ambitions far outstripped the resources available to achieve them, and that was mostly on purpose. It was assumed that each employee could do the work of two or three people via “ruthless prioritizing” or “smart trade-offs” or other rational-sounding methods that in reality panned out more as working through weekends and answering e-mails at midnight knowing you’d wake up at 6:00 a.m. to a flood of new ones.

“He’s a good man,” she’d said. “But a good man isn’t enough to make a life on.”

“Meditation at Lagunitas”

locavores.

Belstaff bag.

woke

Laurie Colwin

It doesn’t take willpower to avoid the thing that is sure to ruin my life; it just takes a fierce, overriding desire to not ruin my life.

John Sindelar,