Right foot, Left foot

Right foot, left foot.
By Katie Cordova
Standing in front of the refrigerator, staring at its closed, dingy yellow stained front, and
speckled with a collection of magnets that I had no idea why they were there or where they had come
from, my mind was both blank and running a million miles a minute. I was conflicted on what I should
do. What the right choice at the moment would be. Weather I should give into my momentary desires or
be strong. Strong like I was unsure how to do.
It's funny how you have the chance to start fresh again as the sun rises each morning. It's as if
the darkening of the earth from the sun setting deep into the west cleanses it's people and washes all of
their past problems away. And when the sun breaks the eastern horizon again, the possibilities for the
future always seem endless. Life seems finally changeable, and even if just for a little while, history
seems to not exist.
I promised myself on this day, as I had on almost every other day, that I would start this one
anew and fresh and full of hope for the future. Not to be distracted by my sins of the past and to forgive
myself and for a little while. All of my dreams that I had been so fearful of seemed possible in those
moments.
But then we get dressed just as we always do, and we brush our teeth just as we always do, and
we get in our cars and we drive to our jobs and we say out niceties and preform our tasks and we smile
and nod. We direct our smiles towards a secret enemy and share a joke with an unwanted acquaintance,
and swear under our breath at a boss we are jealous of. Then we get back in our cars and drive home
again, just as we always do.
And through the course of our day we are imprinted again by our choices that we make, and are
reminded of the life we live, and the past that eventually lead to where we are standing at that moment
and the habits we held onto so closely, locked deep inside of us. And as hopeful as the new day started,
it is after we remember again who we really are that our lives seem inevitable and our pasts come back
to confront us, face to face. To mock us and say, you were weak this whole time.
Today I had woken up, holding my clean slate in my hand, and declaring that today I was going
to choose not to drink. That today, instead of drinking, I would go for a run as a means to deal with my
emotions. That instead of masking my emotions in a booze filled fog, hiding behind having to deal with
the loneliness, the quiet inside my fathers house, I would confront the silence and deal.
But this evening, after the events of the day laid their marks down on my clean slate, I was
reminded again who I really was inside. I wasn't strong. I was lonely and I was sad.
And I was an alcoholic.
The front side of this fridge where I was standing, frozen in time, was a reminder of my past
indeed. My father was an alcoholic. I opened the door to the fridge, to my father's fridge, and looked on
the bottom shelf where the beer had always been kept. This shelf was filled for so long with a certain
brand of beer that was my dads. It was his and no one else, and growing up the sight of that bottle had
always instantly reminded me of him, and as I got older, the smell of beer on his, or anyone's breath,
always brought me back to memories of my childhood. But now the beer that was on this shelf was a
different brand. Somehow it just didn't seem right.
I picked up a bottle from the fridge and held it in my hands. It was cold. Beer always had a way
of feeling colder and crisper then any other drink. The crispness had a comforting sense about it. I
closed the door of the fridge and turned away from it with the bottle in my hand.
My face felt hot. The skin on my cheeks and on my arms had become tingling and warm. I
stopped in my path and took a few deep breaths.
“No!” I shouted aloud and quickly turned back around, swinging the door back open and
returned the bottle to it shelf. I slammed the door of the fridge and turned my back to it. 'Just go put your running shoes on and leave,' I thought to myself. 'Once you do you will be fine
and you wont want to drink anymore.' I grabbed the shoes from under the kitchen table and
immediately left the house, slamming the back door behind me.
The sun was lower in the sky and the air had a cool, sharpness to it. It reminded me in a way of
the comforting feeling of the cool sharpness of the bottle I help just minutes ago. Cleansing. “Just get
on the road, just get on the road..” I repeated as I shook my head back and forth, sitting on the step of
my back porch, tying one shoe at a time. It seemed harder this evening, my hands seemed shakier then
before. “Just get on the road, one foot in front of the other. Right foot, left foot.”
I slapped my hands on my knees, hard, just after I tied the last knot and pushed myself up and
walked down the never ending drive way. My heart pounded in my ears, my cheeks burned, my head
spun. The driveway seemed to get longer as I kept walking and suddenly everything seemed to be
overwhelming. My steps felt heavy, my shoulders were slouching and the sun, despite to crispness that
was in the air, seemed to beam down on me in an unbearable way.
'What am I doing out here?' I thought to myself. My pace slowed as if I had a sudden realization
of what I was actually doing. Like I had just woken up from a day dream.
“I can't do this.” I stopped mid-way down the drive, turned around and headed straight back
towards the house.
'I'm weak.' I thought as I was walking.
'No I'm not,' the counteractive thought came to my mind.
'No. Your WEAK' another thought jumped quickly behind the other, deafening it.
“You don't have to do this. You have the choice,' my hands began to shake.
'Yes! You! Do!' This thought was again, so loud in my mind that I could have sworn everyone
around me could hear it as well.
'Just like him...' This thought was calm.
I stood still. Frozen in time, staring at the back door of my father's house. His deafeningly quiet
house. I knew what he chose. I didn't have to make the same choices that he did. I didn't want to...
I turned around one last time back down towards the street again. I shook my hands and my
arms out, breathing deeply. Determination was in my mind and all I could see in front of me were the
next few steps.
'If there was a neighbor watching me out their window right now, they must think that I was
nuts,' the thought suddenly popped in my mind. My lips cracked as a smile came ever so slightly to my
mouth and with that fleeting thought in my mind, I reached the bottom of the driveway and picked up
my feet and broke out into a slow and steady run. Out onto the street and away from that house. With
each step, the little house bounced up and down from the view behind me, bouncing further and further
away.
“Okay, you got this. You can do this,” I chanted aloud as my feet hit the ground. My breath
quickened at first, but then slowed rhythmically as is the melody of a song. The earth around me was
still. The trees motionless in the absence of wind in the crisp evening air. The slightest sweat broke on
my brow, the cadence of my heart beat leveled off as I rounded the corner of the next street.
The pounding of my feet against the concrete on the side of the road became methodical.
Right foot, left foot. Right foot, left foot.
The earth around me was quiet still. Too quiet possibly.
Thump thump, thump thump.
The silence became all too real as I looked around and began searching.
'Ugh' My thoughts began to return to me in the absence of outside distraction. 'Dad.' I shook my
head physically as the memory of my father came to my mind. 'Why.' I thought again.
“Why!” I rose my hands up to the sides of my ears as I looked up to the sky and shouted the
word aloud.
Inhale, exhale. My cheeks began to burn again as I started to remember why I chose to drink on a regular basis.
Inhale, exhale. The thoughts were strong in my head, and they hurt to think about. The
memories that I had of my dad, and everything that happened with him were still fresh in my mind. So
fresh I was unsure how to deal with them.
Inhale, exhale. Inhale, right foot. Focus on the road. Exhale, left foot. Chin up, head up. Straight
ahead. Look only at the road in front of you, the steps in front of you that you have to take and nothing
else. Right foot, left foot.
'Why didn't he choose life?' The thoughts came back to me as I kept running. 'Why didn't he
choose us?' They were louder this time. 'Didn't he see that we loved him? That his children wanted to
be with him? That we needed him to keep living!?' My foot steps became louder. Instead of their
rhythmic meditative cadence, the steps began to pound in my ears. RIGHT FOOT, LEFT FOOT.
'Why did he have to drink?' My thoughts circled and my skin started to become hot again and
tingle on it's surface. My heart pounded a little harder with each pound of my foot steps onto the
concrete earth.
'Why did he have to drink himself to death!' The words yelled at me in my mind.
'He left himself for dead! Dead on the ground! On the ground for me to find him. His child!'
Tears sprung to my eyes and my breath became so rapid it became difficult to breath. I ran faster, trying
to out run the tears, the heat on my skin. Trying to outrun the immediate pain. The loss of a life.
But I just couldn't run fast enough...
My pace slowed as my feet stumbled. I tripped over myself and my came to a sudden halt. I
stopped and sat down on the curb next to the street draping my hands over my face as tears poured
down my cheeks and my quickened breathing turned into gasping sobs. I could hear the sound and feel
the pain of my heart breaking into two.
My dad, my friend, had died. I would never see him again or talk to him again. I had to witness
him making the choice of drinking himself into his death for years. Standing in front of him and in
front of his doctors listening to him say it wasn't him, it was us. He didn't have the problem, we did.
My sobs grew louder as I grasped my chest with my hands as I gasped for air. The pain my
heart grew deeper and more physical with each breath.
For years I had begged for his change as I watched his mind slip in and out of reality, eventually
reaching to the point where his reality no longer had any rhyme or reason or even meaning inside of it.
And I found him that day.
Laying on his living room floor. Alone.
A man that had owned the love of a women, the adoration of four children. Of friends, of family
and a passionate love for the life that he lived everyday; had died alone, and rotting, without a sole to
know or to find him there. With only the bottle by his side as he left the world that had loved him so
much. His eyes and mind empty and sole less. A waste...
The pain inside that I felt wasn't new, but it was unfamiliar. It was a sadness that I had grown
accustomed to masking with an alcohol filled numbness that helped me cope with a death that I
couldn't figure out how to understand. I wanted to understand it. I wanted to make sense of it and to fix
it.
But I couldn't fix it.
What was; is. And what is; is just the way that it is...
My breath began to slow as my tears began to slow and eventually come to a stall. I slowly
opened my eyes and stood up. I took a deep breath and wiped the remainder of the tears that had
stained my cheeks. I looked around the neighborhood I had lived in for so many years. My vision was
fresh and renewed like a plastic filter was pulled off of my eyes and I realized something.
The world was the same as it was when I had started my run.
The sun was in the same place in the same sky, the street was covered with the same trees and
the same houses. Nothing had changed about the world that I lived in. But I realized something else. Despite the fact that everything around me was the same, there as
something that was different. The trees looked the same, but felt different. The sun too was the same
brightness in the sky, but its rays felt different on my skin.
With another deep breath I picked up my feet again. Right foot, left foot. I started to run again,
the same as I had before down the same street that I had just stopped on, but the street was new and
fresh, my mind was new and fresh.
I turned down my street to head back to the house that I had lived in for so long and had so
many sad memories attached to. I felt my skin heat up again. My face tingling and the fair standing up
on edge with anxiousness.
'Would I every be able to deal with it? With this place. With the untimely death of someone that
was so close to me? Someone I loved so much and held to such high standards? Belittled and taken
away from me in such a tragic way?'
I circled up to my driveway again slowing to a walk and taking a breath.
A deep inhale through my nose, an exhale out of my mouth. The heat left a little from my face I
exhaled. The breath was cleansing and with it I felt a little better. I kept walking, approaching the back
door of my house and took another deep breath. Inhaling and exhaling, concentration on the breath,
detaching myself from the emotion that was brought upon by the sight of the door and concentrating
only on the inhale and exhale of my breath. I realized then that it wasn't the world that was different, it
was me that was different.
I didn't know how I was going to make it though this.
I opened up the back door, back into the kitchen, and back in front of the fridge.
I didn't know how I was going to make it through this day.
I opened up the refrigerator and looked at the bottle I had picked up earlier. I felt the heat again
on my face. I picked the bottle up and stared at it.
Inhale, exhale.
I looked at the bottle again and thought of my dad again. Deep inhale.
I miss you dad.
And with a deep exhale my head cleared slightly, and I put the bottle back in the fridge, closed
the door and walked out of the kitchen. With one last breath I looked back at the refrigerator door one
more time, speckled with memories from an old life with one more deep inhale, and with an exhale I
turned off the light and walked out of the room.
I didn't know how I was going to make it through the week, tomorrow, or even the rest of the
evening. But I knew I had made it through this moment without a drink. I knew I would make it if I
could take each moment one step at a time.
Right foot, left foot.