Bump in the Road

The blood trickled down into my eyes, clouding my vision as the pain raced through my right leg and forehead.....and grew exponentially as I pulled myself from the wreckage of my 4Runner onto a carpet of saw briars, each one inch long, that tore through my hands, clawed my back like ravenous teeth , and raked skin from the back of my bald head. I tried to stand but the broken bones in my upper right leg screamed, and I collapsed again onto the carpet of briars.

The rain washed some of the blood away, and I could see the wreckage of the SUV, the metal frame rippled and crumpled like a discarded piece of paper, lying in the thirty foot deep chasm on the side of the country road I was driving down....flying down, and looked up only to see the dirt embankment where I had been only seconds before blocking my escape from the bottom...the sharp and jagged rocky bottom of twenty years of living day in and day out in the fog of whatever drink or drug I could manage to swallow while trying to fill the deep and painful hole in my soul. Totally beaten , I virtually and involuntarily surrendered, and at the mercy of my choices , I screamed and cursed life, God, and all at once, through bloody tears came to the deeply painful conclusion that I had pounded myself into submission. I was helpless to the myriad of horrible choices I had made in the unending cycle of regret fueled by chronic alcohol abuse, coupled with the rage in my soul crying out for the numbing oblivion, however transient that feeling had become, of the whisky that has become my best friend. A friend that finally betrayed me and left me alone...broken and humbled to face the one coming tide of consequences.

Although the closing of my first company, the estranged marriage, the pending foreclosure of my home, and the certain bankruptcy all screamed at me to stop...I had once again succumbed to the false promises of a drink, and now was facing months of mountainous effort to claw my way back to the surface where my 2 year old daughter was waiting...looking down with tear soaked eyes at her beaten and bloody rag of a father....wondering where the man she loved had gone. Little was I to know that only two months later, my estranged wife would take her own life, leaving my daughter with only one parent. The choice was as clear as the hard road ahead...a path to bring myself back to the land of the living...the place where I would meet myself eye to eye to garner the strength to reshape my broken spirit and broken body.