Healthy Self-Regard

Before the chapters, before the practices, before the years of sitting at kitchen tables with other women learning how to come back to ourselves, there was a bathroom floor.

I want to put you in the room.

I was twenty-four years old. I’d a daughter who was three. She was upstairs, in a bed I hadn’t made, sleeping in pajamas with feet still on them. It was a Tuesday, Wednesday, maybe, at some hour my watch knew and I didn’t.

The wine had run out at some point I couldn’t remember. I’d been crawling on my hands and knees through my own house, looking for a bottle I was too drunk yesterday to remember where I’d put.

I was twenty-four years old, crawling on the bathroom floor of a house I owned, in a marriage that was about to end, looking for wine I’d hidden from a woman I no longer trusted. And the woman I’d hidden it from was me.

My cheek touched the tile.

I stopped looking.

I stayed there.