She was "Revolver" and made me feel ok when my hair got too long. Being with her was the 3^rd beer during lunch on a warm day. She wore black-frame glasses and talked about the state of California's education system. I could hear the hem of her skirt brush over un-mowed grass and she'd smile at me as if I were a mischievous child.

When we went to class we'd sit rows apart to make the time in between more important. We would forego the parking shuttle and walk the mile or so to our cars at the Santa Monica Airport, brown-bagging tall boys as we went passed stalled traffic. She listened to Jeff Buckley religiously and slept till noon on Sundays. Hours were wasted at beach front cafes and she'd never talk about having to go to work the next day.

"Hello. My name is Micah and I'm an alcoholic."

"Hello Micah," resounded the group towards the podium.

"I don't really know if I am an alcoholic- but the last three months have been scuffed knuckles and mornings waking up on the steps that lead to my apartment. I hear bar bands in my head and by the time the liquor wears off I feel the need to clear my mind by flooding it again."

"Why don't you tell us a little bit about why you came here tonight?" The moderator spoke gently, like in a library, and looked like he worked the docks down in Long Beach.

"I woke up shivering on my door mat and when I was done feeling hung over I ended up here." The group quietly applauded.

She was a rainy afternoon in January with Cat Stevens on the record player. She was "One Too Many Mornings" and the tear you shed during Amelie. Her kisses at 4 am were better than the sex at 11. She was soft when I ran my fingers down her back and was hard-pressed to find a reason against prayer in school. She argued about the US's denial of the Kyoto Treaty and whether or not Riesling was the proper wine to drink with take-out Thai. I thought about kissing her when we were apart and I thought of only her when we kissed.

She smoked French cigarettes and drank Irish beer and used chopsticks when she ate Chinese. We went to the NuArt Cinema on Fridays and to Point Dume up the coast on warm afternoons for a long sit on the bluffs over looking the sea. I thought about the day we met often but never really could remember it.

"I guess it's been like this for years, but I've really been worrying about my behavior for the past few months. I'd come home to my place and listen to "The White Album" and have a drink. I'd turn it over and have a few more. Then I'd open some wine and walk around my neighborhood. When that bottle was done I'd walk further and chase down another drink and another and another and wake up the next day with the taste of Bushmills and smoke in my mouth. I don't even know why I do it, but I've done it for years. Just- sometimes are worse than others." The group sipped strong coffee and gave another weak round of applause.

The longshoreman asked if I was ok and I asked if I could smoke. He nodded yes. "When I was younger I never really drank at parties, like, heavily; but I would drink when I was alone in my room or at parks. Usually if something bad had happened. Something was always wrong: chick drama- lost a roll in a play- failed a test; but I'd also drink if there wasn't a reason. Like, things would be going well and I'd focus on when the other shoe was going to drop. Then something'd happen and I'd drink more." I smoked my cigarette in the silence.

She was Christmas Eve and I'd long to wake up each morning just to look at her, unconscious in my Lakers t-shirt. She would read the Los Angeles Times and make me coffee. She would wave to me through the windows as I left for work. Every day she'd do this and every day her clothes got bigger and I'd pretend not to notice. She wrapped herself in an afghan when it started to get cold and was frightened to drive in the rain. She would call me at work if the cat got outside and never picked up the mail from our box. She was the last few minutes of a Fellini film and the opening notes on a Chet Baker track. She looked like a tubercular gypsy with dark skin, a silk scarf wound about her neck. She was the cover of "Ritual de lo Habitual" and the cigarette after a long flight. She wore Jackie O. shades and spoke Spanish with an adorable American accent. I always got a call at 4 to see if I'd be home by 6 and there was always a kiss waiting for me at the door. Coletrane'd be on in the bedroom.

"I don't know if I should worry too much. I mean, I can go days without drinking. Even longer. But once I start, I go on, like, week long binges. Every girl I see with curly hair haunts me and makes me cry in my beer."

"So, Micah- What would you say is the cause of your most recent bender?"

"Why?" I retorted, smoke burning my nose.

"Maybe you can isolate your trigger. What triggered you onto the last jag that led you here today?"

"I dunno. Loneliness?"

She stopped reading the paper and stopped fixing coffee. She transformed into the scenes from "Lawrence of Arabia" when he was lost in the desert. She forgot about education- hers and otherwise- and kept the blinds drawn all day. She was "Exit on Main Street." She read Permanent Midnight and drained glass after glass of red wine and stopped singing in the shower. She was a black and white photograph. She stopped kissing me at 4 am. Her skirts fell from her waist and dragged on the ground. The apartment smelled of smoke and perspiration. She wrapped herself in her afghan in May and slept all day. She was an Elliot Smith song. When I wasn't with her I thought about kissing her, and when we did, I imagined kissing her a year ago.

"What loneliness, Micah?"

"My roommate moved out," I stumped out my cigarette and lied.

"Were you close?"

"As close as you and me- I mean, like, as close as here and there." I lit another.

"But- were you two ever involved?"

"Involved? She and I?" I took a drag and spit smoke. "More so than I could ever say."

"Could her leaving, then, have driven you to drinking? Cause you, ultimately, to harm yourself?" The moderator spoke at me, he did it so often. The first names in the audience had all gone through the same interrogation and now they sat puffing on Marlboros, judging me.

She was filthy that last month. She was a game of chess by yourself. She shivered under three quilts and wore socks on her hands, occasionally "Breakfast at Tiffany's" gloves with thumb and forefinger snipped at the tips. She felt like a razor blade and tasted of metal. She only ate deserts, now, and she looked like an Eliot poem. Candles burned all day. I paid the rent, I bought the food and I gave the cat to my mother. In a final attempt I gave her a bath and washed her hair. She kissed me just so, that I felt pulled under water. She was a memory from a long time ago. I felt her kiss me at 4am with wet hair, and when I woke up, she was gone.

"I'm not sure if her leaving set me off or if things were just going too well and I was looking for them to go bad. Maybe I was only with her because I knew, I dunno- it was going to end the way it did." I expelled smoke as I took another drag. "Maybe I'm deluding myself into thinking that my life is so fucked up that I need to drink it out of existence."

"Yes, maybe. But who's to say whose problems are more important than anyone else's? Or yours?" Some of the audience was waking up enough to agree with the longshoreman and from underneath their cloud of blue tobacco smoke and yellow track lighting some of these yea-sayers were listening.

"Maybe you are right about one thing. That my problem's beyond judgment. Maybe they are genuine. All I know is that I've been medicating myself so I don't know what is genuine and what is manufactured."

"Perhaps coming here was a start toward separating the real and the made up. Thank you for doing so." The audience gave mute applause like all the rest and I stubbed out the smoldering stump of a cigarette with brown stained fingers.

"So it seems you lack the ability to separate the real from the illusory." The moderator stepped to me with genuine concern. His breath smelled of Pall Malls and Altoids. There were gray ash marks on his pant fronts and a big black tattoo on thick black forearms.

"I s'pose that's the case."

"But, what is real, anyway?"

"What do you mean?"

"Isn't everything that you go through some sort of illusion? I mean, the real you, the one standing here next to me, is the slate. Things can be added to a slate, but they can be erased also. Do you understand?"

"I think I do." My words made of smoke hung in the air.

"What we take on- who were are and what we do- the people we associate with and the beliefs that we hold are all added to this slate. They're an illusion because they can be removed as easily as they were added and changed if we so desire."

"So, my reality is really an illusion, if I want to change it?"

"That's what brought you here to us tonight, isn't it?" I could see the flash of a silver cross around his neck from behind his Pendleton shirt, unbuttoned at the top. It was then, also, that I felt the weight being lifted from off my chest and a sense of relief, warm and fluid, ran over me. If only for a moment.

"But if all things can be changed- what's to keep them from changing for the worse?" Old habits. . . They rear up and cause me to find fault with what ever good I come into contact with.

"That's life. The chances of relapse or falling off the wagon, what have you, are always there. But to live in fear in order to deny the existence of negative things is a sure way to keep anything positive out."

"But if bad is always there, what's the point? Why even work uphill if I can slide down at any time?"