cava cocktails and codeine

Remember that time we were in Toronto and so was SARS? Everyone walking around the airport with face-masks and my defence against the virus was liquid and strong. Because of the risks, the conference was cancelled and we had three days freedom on the company credit card. Between six and ten every evening in the Hilton cocktail bar, the drinks were free. I remember the fabulousness and Chesterfield sofas and sharing with my colleagues dreams of growing old extraordinary in a corner of Kent, a spinster lush with a pet alpaca, cooking wondrous meals for my guests in an enormous subterranean kitchen. Nobody need tell me it could never happen. For every pace I imagined I advanced, I was spooled ten backwards. It never ceases to amaze me how bipolar recovery is. One morning I'm filled with a sense of being safe and free from resentments. I am leaping down the sunlit corridors, drinking the deep and unmistakable smells of oldness: candlewax, the yellow paper in the lectionary. Then by two thirty, I wonder will I ever come to anything good. The problem is not in finding a voice, the reality is that I have nothing to say. Imogen says I have to understand that today I am good enough exactly as I am. No, what I am today isn't good enough and I cannot see how, given the objective evidence I could believe anything else. So wouldn't it be nice to have one last fantasy tonight, one last evening sitting at home drinking cava cocktails and codeine and for say, seven hours, pretend I am somebody else, somebody super.