A Sugar Hangover.

 

What is Freedom?

Raw thoughts pour into my brain – Am I truly free?

Sweat pours through my skin.

Why am I crying?

 

The hottest summer in recorded history and I am camping in a converted (not much) shop. I have single glazing and a glass door; the sun beats in at certain times of the day, although I keep the door and window shut when it is hottest. Thankfully there is an old and very dusty Venetian blind on the large window which I can scroll closed to keep out most of the sunlight. It also keeps out prying eyes but, unfortunately, a lot of the daylight too.

 

I have made this place a home and it is really, quite comfortable. True, I have no shower, but I do have a toilet and wash hand basin. It is enough.

The ‘kitchen’ is a table and a cheap IKEA kitchen island, both of which I already owned. My ‘kitchen sink’ is a pink basin that is perched atop a large coffee table balanced on two trestles – I found all these items beside the bins and dragged them home. The dish washing area is functional, but I yearn for a real kitchen sink again.

 

Eventually, I had to cut across the slow lawyers’ negotiations. I withdrew my appeal and paid my debt. Since January a further 3,000 euros in interest had been added to my bill. This was the reason for my extreme anxiety—in two years’ time it would have been 10,000. I winced as I handed it over—it would have been enough to buy a kitchen.

I sighed and paid in instalments, as my online bank would not permit me to transfer more than 30,000 per day in 15,000 increments. It took me four days to complete the payment – in which time I had accrued another 2.25 in interest. A cup of coffee.

But it is over. 

 

I cried with relief and my heart feels lighter.

 

I was afraid I would feel so happy that I would want a drink – but oddly, I didn’t.

 

More freedom.

 

In my head I hear Janis Joplin singing a song to her lost lover—Bobby McGee. Her gritty voice rasps with so much soul, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

 

But I still have lots to lose. 

 

My life is rich and full of people and joy and tragedy. All the things that make life worth living. Money is just a thing that I need to buy food and pay the utilities. I have enough, I am happy and I have my health. Having passed the test of almost becoming homeless I realise that some things are just not as important as I used to think they were. Though having somewhere to live is vital—it just might not be the place that you envisioned. And I also realise that what I have is more than some people can ever dream of.

 

The tumult of the past seven months is finally easing, and I am finding myself with time on my hands again. My two old ladies take up a lot of my daily routine, but now I can also spend more time getting down on the floor with them to give them the cuddles and gentle care that they deserve. They are both 16 and have slowed down considerably in the past couple of years – but I had been so preoccupied with all my own problems I hardly noticed. It was through other’s eyes that I first noticed how skinny Candy has become and how deaf and blind Kerry is. So now I take the time with them. I handle them gently as I clean the grubby mouths, the eye bogeys, and the occasional mucky tails. This morning Kerry urgently needed to go out at 7.00am. she wouldn’t take no for an answer, so, bleary-eyed, I saddled her up and we went outdoors where she delivered several soft poos and upon returning home, promptly got sick. “You are such a clever girl,” I murmured into her ear as I wiped her tail and then her grubby little whiskers.

 

Our walks are slower than molasses on a cold day.

 

A cold day, now that would be a novelty. The hot summer has taken its toll, although thankfully, the June/July heatwaves have finally given way to more moderate heat. Either that or I have acclimatised. I bought a fan to keep the girls cool, but they prefer to sit behind it, beside it, or anywhere out of its flight path. I think the breeze must irritate their fur. They seek out cool corners against a wall, under a chair or under the TV table and often pace restlessly throughout the night. The heat settles into this long, deep space we inhabit. It works rather like a storage heater, taking heat in during the day, releasing it at night. We sweat, pant, and drink a lot of water.

 

I have the habit now of taking a small water bottle to bed with me. Not to drink—it is half full of frozen water. It is a strange bedfellow that creaks and cracks after we climb into bed together. During the night, as I roll over from one side to the other the bottle dances on my tummy and then my hip before sliding down into the small of my back where it passes a goodly time, until I roll onto my back and then it is shunted to my side. It is a low-tech solution for a temporary situation and in the morning, I pop it back into the freezer, so that it will be ready again by bedtime.

 

Belonging to AA has changed me. Amongst many serious life-lessons, I am becoming more aware of things like my posture and breathing. It appears to me that a lot of us alcoholics in recovery latch onto other ‘addictions’. I am obsessed with eating more healthily and working on my flexibility—not to mention the meditation and nose breathing.

 

When I first had my poor liver diagnosis back in December, I began my journey any way that I could, replacing alcohol with sweet non-alcoholic wine and potato crisps and dark chocolate and great chunks of tangy cheese, so that it felt like a normal boozy day, but after the initial shock to my system of foregoing my drug of choice, I began to think harder about what foods would actually heal my liver. Mr Google told me that I should be eating lots of cruciferous vegetables (cabbage, broccoli etc), as well as eggs and meat. He also talked at great length about the Keto diet and intermittent fasting. I have never been very good at sticking to things, so the intermittent fasting is, well, intermittent, but nonetheless, some fasting is better than no fasting at all, from what I can gather.

 

I have given up bread and pasta – potatoes were never that important to me and the only sugar I have now is in the form of two squares of dark chocolate, that I eat after my lunch. Chocolate never tasted so good.

 

But everyone needs a break from discipline now and again, so the other evening, I decided to treat myself to an ice-cream for my tea. It was Feria after all, and the whole town was celebrating hard. Instead of walking into town to visit the proper Italian gelato shop, I went to the local ice-cream parlour. It was, to say the least, disappointing, and to add insult to injury, owing to the intake of extra sugar, I suffered all night, tossing and turning and unable to sleep until the wee hours of the morning. I woke with a dry mouth and an enormous sugar hangover and stumbled fog-brained through the morning hours vowing, “never again!”

 

However, it would be worth doing it for a cherry flavoured gelato from Santini’s.