I smile, because I’m up with the sun.

Stretching out in bed, I see it coming through the blinds, shining in brilliant stripes on my most recently emptied liquor bottle: Johnny Walker Blue Label, sitting on the shelf opposite the window.

How I acquired this bottle is, honestly, unclear. I barely remember someone handing it to me at the end of a party, a half-inch of liquid still sloshing at the bottom. They were probably just trying to get rid of leftovers, but Blue Label’s a pretty expensive leftover, so I don’t know. I guess they might have been trying to impress me. Guys do that sometimes when you’re a not-terrible-looking girl. Anyway, I was drunk. It’s all pretty hazy.

However it went down, every time I see the sun on that fancy bottle I’m glad my last drink was classy. Imagine if it had been a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon or something.

I doubt I would have kept an empty Blue Ribbon can for seven years.

Some souvenirs mark you as a connoisseur with the finest taste. Some just make you feel like a slob who can’t be bothered to walk thirty feet to the recycling. That I’ve been able to keep this one is fortunate, since [i]how[/i] I came to have it is less important than [i]why[/i] I still have it.

I have it because don’t think I’d be sober if I didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t cop to being an alcoholic. Alcoholics go to meetings. I don’t. I looked into AA, the twelve-step thing, and tripped over my own feet somewhere between steps one and two. My life wasn’t exactly unmanageable, and the higher power idea rubbed me wrong. If there’s really a ‘higher power’ that can get me out of anything I can’t get myself out of, it shouldn’t have put me there in the first place. Jerk. Being one of the only women was also weird. I felt like an awkward outsider peering through the window into some boy’s club.

When my turn came around to say the litany, “Hi, my name is ___ and I’m an alcoholic,” I froze, then stood up and walked out, blank-faced.

So that’s why the reason seeing the sun on that bottle is so important is the part you’re going to think makes me crazy.

I’m sober because I found a sun goddess.

Hear me out. It’s something like this: the morning—okay, noon—I first woke up to that empty scotch bottle is when I began to debate myself. It was when I started worrying that maybe the parties weren’t so great, and maybe the increasingly frequent feeling that I “needed” a drink wasn’t alright.

I don’t know why, but for some reason I was thinking about a sun goddess at the time. I don’t know where the idea came from, but I imagined asking what she’d think, what she’d want.

I was surprised when she answered. She said, “You shouldn’t stop drinking for me. You should do it for you.”

Even more surprising, in that moment, I had a clear vision. I knew her, perfectly. And get this: she’s not a judging goddess. She doesn’t want me to admit I’m horrible. She doesn’t want blood, doesn’t want retribution.

All she wants is for me to become a better person.

When I say I heard her speaking to me, I don’t mean in the hearing voices kind of way. I mean the way I’d hear something in a memory, knowing it’s just my own mind. This makes it all a bit strange, because know she’s not real. At least, not real-real.

But the thing is? It doesn’t matter.

If ‘real’ is defined by the effect something has in your life, then she’s as real as she needs to be—real enough to keep me sober for seven years, and that’s what matters.

Sometimes it’s bitter and galling. Not a week goes by that I don’t end up bemoaning it. Three days ago I met up with some old friends for dinner. I spent it watching them down margaritas and beers, and thinking, hell, I could have one if I wanted. And I did want to, to spite myself, to prove how pointless sobriety is. I wanted to because I’m a contrarian jerk like that. Sometimes I think I can do anything and get away with it. I did in the past.

But right now...

Right now, it’s alright.

Right now, I smile, because I’m up with the sun.