Good intentions are completely useless here. A person can promise to stop drinking a thousand times, but the bottle always wins the physical fight in the end. The room smells like old sweat and stale breath, a constant reminder that the body is deeply polluted with liquid poison. Families search for the best rehabilitation centre in India expecting magic, but they only find hard work and painful tears. The magic is fake.
Because the magic is fake, the heavy lifting begins immediately. You watch a father try to hold a spoon, but his hand shakes so badly that the soup spills on the table. A strict alcohol rehab in Mumbai forces the patient to sit in the horrible discomfort without any chemical help. The core of it is a long waiting game where the body violently expels years of toxic waste. You sweat it out.
Trying to control the drinking is a deadly mistake. You cannot negotiate with a brain disease that wants to shut down your liver and put you in the ground. The person tells their family they will only drink two beers, but they always end up drinking twenty beers alone. The many sides of the illness show that absolute zero is the only safe number for a sick person. One drop is fatal.
Because one drop is fatal, the walls must be built high. You separate yourself completely from the old friends who still sit in the dark bars until the sun comes up. The people who answer the phone at four in the morning become your completely new, slightly strange, and sober family. The full truth is that you must cut off the dead branches of your life to save the tree. The old life dies.
Therapy with the family is a battlefield. The mother screams at the son for selling her wedding jewellery to buy small packets of white powder in the slum. You cannot fix a decade of heavy trauma by handing over a cheap paper certificate from a thirty day programme. The area of trust is completely broken, and words will never be enough to fix the shattered glass. You close your mouth.
Because you close your mouth, your actions become very loud. You wake up at six in the morning, you make your bed perfectly, and you show up for your daily tasks. The grit under your fingernails reminds you that you are rebuilding your totally destroyed life brick by slow brick. You pour the bad coffee for the older members and you listen to their harsh but truthful advice. You follow the path.
The path is narrow and very steep. You will feel a sudden wave of dark depression hit you while you are riding the busy local train home. The sick brain whispers that a small drink will fix the heavy sadness, but you know that is a lie. You get off the train and you immediately call your sponsor to stop the dangerous thoughts from growing. You break the cycle.
You fight the exact same battle tomorrow. The disease does not care if you have been clean for ten days or for ten full years. The ghost is always hungry, and it will strike the exact moment you stop paying close attention to your daily habits. You hold the line tightly and you never give up your seat in the group. You stand very firm.
