The Empire
Sun comin' up on a dream come around
One hundred years from the empire now
Sun comin' up on a world that's easy now
—”Empire Now”, Hozier
It’s strange, seeing timers climb—months calculated, days elapsed, seconds slip by. It’s weird glimpsing that the next milestone is 18 months. It’s strange using the word “sober.”
The weirder is a moment that comes unexpectedly: once a month, then three times a day, then not for eight weeks. The shimmer of inspiration, tied to a song or a paragraph or a movie scene. The neural pathways firing in their old electric parade—a midnight runway, a promise of escape…
Halting the synapses in their tracks, rerouting them to…
What? What exactly?
That’s the thing, isn’t it, about sobriety— the dopamine hit isn’t a hit at all. It’s a settling into your foundation. And settling isn’t sexy. It isn’t thrilling. It isn’t a Disney song or a magnum opus. It’s sitting in your living room at 11:56 p.m. with an empty document in front of you, knowing what you could fill it with immediately and choosing to leave it blank.
1 Year
4 Months
18 Days
23 Hours
3 Minutes
14 Seconds
Visions of the universe you deleted rise, unbidden. You admire the architecture of it, the connections, the minor plots, the asteroid belts. And then, just as swiftly, you banish its image. Replace it with…
Christmas-light-crusted row home windows.
An ultrasound of a precious ten-week-old child.
Preschool songs and crafts—she’s currently obsessed with the human body.
Other novel ideas, none of which seem to have the luster of the old universe.
Books and movies that do little but make you feel the urge to create, followed by the cyclical discouragement of not finding in yourself the ability or drive to craft anything else because it’s not the empire.
And you know the gilded memories lie. You remember how the empire crumbled under the weight it could never carry. But you’re nonetheless lost as to what comes next. You are a writer whose worlds spin away from you as fast as you can create them, and so you stop crafting for a few months and wonder if it will ever feel the same.
Even in the future, your story calendar is oriented around the empire.
You wonder if that chronology will ever shift.
