Author: Jenny

Eric is the love of my life. True to the fairy tale depictions of such things, I knew soon after meeting him that I had met my soul mate. In every way, Eric is everything I had always imagined my ideal partner to be. He is naturally kind, innately compassionate, astonishingly intelligent, genuinely thoughtful, uniquely funny, adventurous AND stable (very rarely do those last two attributes go together in the same human being!). On paper he was everything I was hoping for, and even more miraculously, in the most mysterious and intangible way, it just felt right. And he drank. Most nights, Eric drank.

I am an addict. More adverse than my addictions to social media, coffee and chocolate, is my perverse and pervasive addiction to vigilance; my addiction to fear. As early as I can remember, I have felt an insatiable drive to ward off danger. As a little girl, it was the danger of losing those I love to unexpected accidents or to voluntary abandonment. When my mother was a few minutes late coming home from work, I quickly imagined she had been struck by a car or even worse that she did not love me enough to come home. I laid awake at night envisioning the horrors of an imminent nuclear holocaust. Each shadowy bend of the large oak tree outside my bedroom window on windy nights meant it would blow loose and thrust into our apartment, crushing us all. I checked, and checked again, before bed that the deadbolt and chain on our apartment door were locked as I was certain an intruder had plans to burst in and murder my mother, father, our cranky yet beloved cat Joe and me.