At ​t​ Equals Infinity

(At t = ∞ )
 Chapter 1: The Middle

Have you ever felt despair? I mean real despair; the kind of despair

that shatters you, where you see the only way out was in the past,

the only way out was to have never made the mistake of being born.

The despair of death - of damnation. The despair after reading

“abandon all hope ye who enter here” above the gates, and taking that

first of a literally endless number of steps passing the threshold of

doom.

The despair that welcomes absolute oblivion.

Have you not felt this, I would pray - if I did so - that you

never will. If you have, I want you to know that I’ve felt it with

you.

This is not the despair I felt when regaining awareness to

counting. “One, two, three,” as I was lifted from a hospital bed onto

a gurney.

I only felt confused. I was told I had had a seizure while I

was in the ER exam room — the last thing I remembered — as I was

wheeled down the hall, through the waiting room, passing my worried

parents, aunt, and uncle, and into an ambulance to be transferred to

an ICU in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

It was alcoholism that led me here, but not directly from

drinking too much; it was from drinking too little. I was drinking so

heavily that I developed the most extreme form of alcohol withdrawal:

delirium tremens. This is a stage of heavy alcohol abuse where your

body reaches a point that it can not physically survive without

alcohol. This can lead to tremors, vomiting, anxiety, hallucinations,

seizures, and even death. This is what makes alcohol one of the most

dangerous drugs to come down from for heavy users.

There was an unfairness to it, a cosmic injustice of a

twenty-five year old boy who rarely drank until college experiencing

the worse symptoms of decades of alcohol abuse. A boy still in the

years of life where his peers binge drink on the weekends, where

activity is saturated with alcohol. I felt, and feel still, so

cheated by life. But here we are.

This was my rock bottom.

But this is not the beginning of the story, nor is it the end.

It is the exact middle. My days and memories are now defined before

and after these moments. I will return to this day, but before I can

discuss falling into a hole and subsequently climbing out of it, I

need to explore how I dug this grave for myself to begin with. The

story does not begin with when alcohol became a problem. It does not

even begin with my first drink. Events preceded this by years.

This is how I will cope. I will write and write and expose

every bit of fear and anger that led to where I now sit. I will

explore the decade and a half long road of suffering that led to the

unfortunate relief of facing annihilation.

 I ask you, reader, to come with, and feel my suffering, and the

suffering that plagues many others, and perhaps find a bit of your

own suffering within my story.

My name is Daniel James Barker. I am twenty-five years old, and

I am an alcoholic.