I'd Like to Buy You a Drink

A few short months out of treatment, I was a novice in sobriety and moving back to the community where I'd reached the culmination of my thirty-year drinking career. Fear was my constant companion. I was afraid to walk past the dives that at one time had been my asylums of escape from the world of reality. I also had the constant fear of being alone, because in the past I'd chosen not to associate with anyone who wasn't also getting drunk, and therefore, I knew no one else in my own hometown. My greatest fear, however, was of running into someone I did know, not knowing if I'd have the strength to say no when they invited me for a drink for the sake of old times.