I will be completely honest with you, there are times when I feel lost within this real world, I feel as if I was just conceived, a new born, screaming with eyes wide open, waiting for someone to pick me up, for someone to hold me, for someone to comfort me in my time of need. I started drinking at the tender age of fourteen, not knowing that I would not stop until the age of forty, I am fifty-three years of age now, twenty-six years of growth I have missed. I locked myself within my room, the brightness of the day I knew not of, hangovers held me captive, imprisoned and all alone, bottle in hand sitting in darkness, twenty-six years of solitary confinement I sentenced myself to. I feel as if I fell asleep a teenager and woke up a forty year old graying man, my new reality greeted me with open arms, “Welcome back to the real world Mr. O’Bannon, enjoy your stay.” What a difference a loss of time can make, I woke to an unknown world, I woke to a world I had no knowledge of, I was in a land that was foreign to me, I did not belong, I wanted to go back to the life that I lived within my drunken dreams. As I took in this new reality I became aware of the time that I had lost, my parents were much older, my baby sister was a married woman with children, my once young friends were now grown men with wives and kids, some divorced, many had passed on, I missed so much, were did the time go? Many memories I might of made but I will never know, for in a drunken stupor I was. My drunken dreams, once a place of redemption, once a place were I could change my fate, my life, but one can only sleep for so long, reality, my alarm, it was time to wake and face the real world once again.

“Wine is a mocker, trying drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it I not wise.”

Proverbs 20:1

“Welcome to the real world”

DAME