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yourself.
    Either way.

    I’ D ONLY BEEN ON THE WAGON FOR A FEW MONTHS —
    Even if it felt way longer—
    And not once, not for a whole hour of one fucking day, did I really feel calm about it, or serene, or like I had it properly under control. I’d catch myself doing sad, ridiculous things—one day I walked about twenty kays, round trip, to feed a dog in a garden in Fish Hoek that had looked miserable when I went past it the day before.
    Really, just trying to kill off hours
    Wanting
all the time—and that gentle wrack of not having most days stoked a feeling of injustice in me strong enough to close out my interest in the daylight, and force me back to bed, again and again, to cry or berate myself till I just let go and fell asleep.
    And the worst of all: when I’d dream about drugs, and feel so happy, and I’d stay happy for ten, twenty seconds after I woke up—before I’d remember the way things actually were, what my life really was now, and then that curtain would come falling down again and I’d try anything to get back to sleep and into the dream but it was always too late.
    Ja, some days I could feel a bit noble about my efforts, and very rarely I’d get these rills of stoicism running through me
    But it was somewhere in this hazy stretch that I met Charlotte—and honestly, it was only then that the idea I could
actually
change my life got any kind of breath or colour in it.
    Without her … who knows?
    Very quickly, she became a kind of solution to me. This new thing in the world. This shadow-fox that all my hounding thoughts could chase and chase—
    While I lay there in bed, feeling desperate and tragic—determined to stay alive at least until I was sure I couldn’t have her.
    And then one morning hauling myself off to the bathroom.
    Finding my jeans, finding the pillbox in the change pocket.
    Flushing everything in there down the toilet
    And smiling, telling myself,
Give it one more chance, Ed.
    One more chance to let you down.
    And here’s proof.
    Here’s proof you really tried.

THE REST OF APRIL

    T HINKING ABOUT HER ALL THE TIME made me see her everywhere.
    On the street, on the beach, in cars going by, sitting in restaurants, even on TV once or twice—mostly they were young girls who just looked like her till I looked closer, though sometimes my heart went a bit crazy and leapt at anything that was even roughly her size or shape.
    One afternoon I followed a boy for four blocks, getting closer and closer, surer and surer
    Before he pulled down his hoodie and turned round and told me to los hom uit.
    One morning I did the same thing to a woman who must’ve been sixty.

THE BEST DAY

    T HERE WERE THREE DAYS TILL THE NEXT MEETING —
    I’d missed one because of bad nerves—
    And I figured it’d probably help my confidence if I could tell her I’d found some kind of job since the last time she saw me. That’s normally the first thing people do. Well, normally they get religious first, but then they get jobs
    And I knew what I needed—
    Never mind how I was actually feeling—
    What I needed was for her to believe I was strong.
    I was doing it.
    I was getting there.
    So one morning, I was awake and thinking long before I heard the trains, and I got myself out of bed and spent a while in the bathroom and I made an effort to look alright, and then I made sure I ate some breakfast and then for about half an hour I sat with my dream book and I only wrote positive things in it. Then I went out in the weak sun and bought a
Voice of the Village
and a
Tattler
and some coffee, and I sat on a bench on Atlantic Road and started looking through all the classifieds.
    If you count selling drugs and if you count working for my dad when I was sixteen, I’ve had eleven different jobs in my life. Finding them’s never really been the hard part. I’ve bartended, I’ve waited, I’ve signed people up outside a gym, I helped out an old lady in a library who cried when I left, for about two months all I did