Posted here too, please update feeds and links, I'm moving soon.

How could I know something so small could affect me so big?
Stopping merely to get some gas, I've been driving for about a week with the gas light on.
I have to walk inside to pay, because I've only got cash left over from the farmer's market--
where we shop for fresh produce that normally we couldn't afford. We've been eating so much healthier,
nothing pre-processed. Fresh fresh fresh.

I step in line behind two people. One a girl maybe a little younger than me, old enough to buy alcohol, and she does.
She is buying a fifth of Captain Morgan, rum. Behind her, a guy, probably about the same age, maybe a little younger. He's buying two big fountain drinks. I can see they are not filled to capacity, there is still room left, to pour in the rum. He is old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes. He does. She is giddy. Giggly, happy about her purchase it seems. About the idea that soon they will consume and be consumed by intoxication.

I step to the counter, say $10.03, and hand over my ten dollar bill and the three pennies I've fished from my console. I walk away. I'm thinking about the girl, and the boy. I'm thinking about the guys I saw on my drive to the gas station, sitting on their front porch, the yard in front of them littered with cups, one lights a cigarette and the other takes a swig of beer, it is 4:00 in the afternoon. I think about what alcohol used to be for me. The relationship we were in. How I loved myself more when it was inside me, how I loved others more and how everything felt so much better. I think about the crave I feel towards it, and about how if I did succumb to that crave it would drown the flower that is blooming in my heart. I think about those who can drink responsibly. I think about the artists that have made their fame with their relationship to this lover. I feel used up and confused. I feel sad, a mourning for the person I used to be-- cool like that, alcohol and drugs, coffee and cigarettes. And I can tell myself over and over, that this is the right path (in my heart I know it is), but it doesn't take the loss away. It doesn't take it away, I think, only time can do that. Time and patience and self love that I could never get from a bottle. It still hurts.