Sober Night Out

by Rax King

Getting sober changed a lot of my friendships in ways I didn’t expect. Well, okay, getting sober eliminated a lot of my friendships—we’d once stayed up half the night crowing about our love for each other, but it turned out that what we really loved was Jim Beam and cocaine, and otherwise had nothing in common. In those cases, it made sense for the friendships to die; what made less sense was how even genuinely close friendships felt like they had developed a limp. My comrades and I kept lurching awkwardly forward, unable to figure out how to compensate for the lack of booze, which we didn’t realize had been holding us upright.

After two years and three months of sobriety, I think I’ve identified the most prominent source of the discomfort: daytime.

As a drinker and cokehead, I’d been strictly a nocturnal animal. I worked a nine-to-five for much of that time—in fact, I worked a seven-to-three for much of that time, which often meant clocking in directly after a night of partying, with hours of bad behavior smeared all over my sweaty face. I came alive only at night, and my friends knew it. In those years there were few coffee dates, with the café windows beaming the sun into our eyes like so many magnifying glasses over ants. I rarely even managed to catch the tail end of happy hour.

Then I quit, and was instantly conscripted into an army of daywalkers with incomprehensible habits, a world of lunch-sized salads and coffee shop punch cards. All my clothes were bodycon, all my makeup bright or glittery or requiring special glue to apply. There seemed to be no place for me in the daytime, but suddenly it was the only time any of my old friends would offer me. I knew why, too: they were saving the night for getting drunk or high. Even if they didn’t end up doing it, they didn’t want to slot me in for a time when they might decide to. I’d done the same thing to all my own sober friends before I became one of them, and now here I was, confined myself to that familiar old jail cell of one-hour lunches.