My gramma has always spoiled me.

Even now, with her savings dwindling thanks to me in my addiction (and sometimes out of it), she tries her hardest to spoil me, give me everything I want, everything she can. It hurts and is lovely all the same. It’s the kind of thing a mom would do, my mom especially. With my mom dead between us, we have reached across the divide on instinct to some degree, saying here, I’ll be that for you, let me, I need to, please.

It sucks. It’s magical. I love her dearly.

My first year sober was especially rough. She trusted me immediately, of course. When I was still in denial she was the one that hung on the longest with me, arguing to others I didn’t have a problem, because of course that’s what I’d said. Then, after rehab, she switched overnight from vehement defense of my denial to absolute pride in my small, shriveled recovery that had barely gotten growing. Before I was working on why I drank, I was showered with praise for stopping drinking at all. I said in rehab once: this is hard because no one will be proud of me for graduating rehab.

She was. She told her friends like I’d graduated college, bragged to our family like I’d completed some dream.

In that first year she was especially broke. I’d taken maybe 50k from her in the final year of my drinking and using, all handed over, but all reaped. I was made of shame rather than guilt and called her every day. She loved this. Forgave me immediately, and while she had nothing, she got a free chromebook when she signed up for a different wireless provider and was thrilled, absolutely thrilled to present me with it for my birthday.

I grimaced as she did. Smiled hard. Felt shame.

For a while I just used it to do the same things I’d done high. Surf tumblr, watch youtube, whatever. It’s not like I could download games. Google drive existed on it, poised and ready, and I didn’t touch it.

Until I did.

I started writing one day very slowly, squeezing one constipated word from my fumbling fingers at a time, and then, it was a rush, a deluge, the best thing I’ve ever done come back to greet me on the other side.

Writers like to say they write better drunk, they imagine better high, whatever. I’m not sure how it is for you, but for me, none of that mattered because I didn’t finish a single goddamn thing in the whole decade or so I spent intoxicated. It didn’t matter that the sentences might be better (and looking back, they’re not). I didn’t complete anything. So, what’s the point?

My grandmother had given me back a piece of myself I’d thought I’d killed. The little kiddo with the hulking desktop computer, writing about a girl in a magical land with a crystal, whatever, whatever! It didn’t matter! I had finished the goddamn crystal book, before oblivion.

Post-oblivion, I found it again and the world got brighter. Not only that, I got able to describe that brightness, take it in my mouth and swallow it like medicine before letting it tap tap tap lightly from my fingers.

Thank you. Thank you so, so much.