Seven days of flu, hallucinations, and sweat ended my relationship with alcohol.

I never planned on stopping drinking. I just woke up one morning with the flu.

You know, feeling like a dish rag that got wedged behind the sink, your joints popping and groaning like Frankenstein’s monster and your voice sounding like Tom Waits. Not even a cold beer sounds appealing.

The first day was easy, I drifted in and out laying on the couch, vaguely aware of some detective show on the retro channel, staring at stucco on the ceiling like it is some secret message in cuneiform.

By the end of day two I had entered into a fever dream. My brain was a psychedelic movie theater. My liver danced by floating in a pool of fat, waiting to be foie gras for the Grim Reaper. In a visceral rush the lipids kept pouring in. My liver tried to swim and a voice that sounded just like me said, “One more for the road.”

There is no subtlety in this liminal space, these dreams are like a two-by-four from the subconscious on you waking mind. My liver sent out an SOS that came through in sweat and hallucination.

New Year’s Eve dawned in sweat soaked sheets. I could barely get up, let alone think about walking to the store for alcohol. Beer is on the back burner when you body feels like a used punching bag.

The next few days I went from feeling like roadkill to semi-human. Those stupid visions from days earlier haunted me. The fever broke and what would normally be an occasion to celebrate with a drink, pat yourself on the back for not ending up with pneumonia or, worse, in the hospital, wasn’t.

It had been 7 days without it. I could give myself a few more days sans alcohol. It was weird, in a good way, like someone took Windex to my brain. So I kept going.

The eighth day God said, “You are off the hook.” I felt better, not great. No preach to rafters impulse that you see in self-help ads, the sun rising over a desert vista with 2 people walking the horizon. Morning arrived without the fog of being hungover again.

I began to sit in silence when I woke each day. I bought a notebook and started hitting those pages like a bottle of Bourbon when your girl split with your best friend. And it was good, not half hearted mental masturbation parading as depth.

I began to realize what I knew before, when the girls were young and I didn’t drink for a few years. Mainly that all the lies I told myself about alcohol making me witty or creative had been laughing at me for many years. Like a doctor sticking a thermometer up your ass and wandering off, then when he comes back calling it treatment.

I began to see it as a beautiful accident. It was strange, no declaration or grand resolution, no self talk in the bathroom mirror.

I just never walked back up the liquor store.

Sometimes you stop something because it has a shelf life. Sometimes because it is evil or a sure way to hit rock bottom. And sometimes, because you realize it never did what you thought it did.

My shadows like to whisper, “Alcohol is a magic trick. The night will be brilliant, your thoughts too, the world will be a better place with a drink or two.”

But at some point you realize the trick never really worked out as advertised.

For me it took getting flu to put the bottle down. Not in anger. Not because I had too. Not with forethought and planning.

Sometimes reason is absent, but you still walk away.