I watched the first sproutlings push themselves through the hard earth, bursting into bloom at the touch of the sun. I watched the leaves unfurl, each morning lusher and fuller than the last. I watched the grass shade from brown to yellow to a taunting absinthe-green, as the snow melted and the rotting leaves sank into the soil. I watched the light gather itself, muscle itself from weak diffusion to insistent heat, coaxing every living thing back to life.
And I tried hard not to write songs that used what I saw as metaphors for my own rebirth. I tried not to identify too strongly with the weak, twisted things slumbering underground, that burst into slow and glorious bloom as they awoke. Not because I didn’t hope desperately to be tickled awake gently by the sun, or because I hadn’t been a weak and twisted thing. But because I knew the danger of waiting for some outside force to bend a gentle knee and change my life. I knew that if anything was going to bring me back to life, it would have to be me.
This was no natural circle of life, but a desperate resurrection. I had to put one self to death before it could kill the one I hoped to create.
I had checked myself into rehab for the fourth time, with no magical sense that anything was different than it had been the three times before. Nothing except, maybe, a little more fear. A little less energy. And a sense of shame so strong it threatened to consume me. The difference that time hadn’t come before; it had come in what I did after.
I didn’t go back to music. Didn’t book more tour dates, arrange more studio time, or call my manager to discuss next career plans. Because it seemed like the only way. I knew my triggers, knew the way the road seeped into my veins as surely as a needle, opening me up, making patterns I couldn’t claw my way clear of.
It wasn’t the music, not really. It was everything that surrounded it. It was the way a city where no one knew me made me feel like I could do anything and then leave it there. The way the aftermath of each show felt like a party, so I acted like I was at one. How being watched onstage made me feel, somehow, like I was safe. Like I couldn’t possibly make a mistake so huge I couldn’t take it back.
No, it wasn’t the music, but I didn’t know any other way to do music than with the people I’d always done it with, in the places I’d toured for years. It felt safer to make a clean break. To create a world without music and everything that went along with it. To remove the temptation and all that reminded me of it.
I didn’t go home to my apartment in the city, or meet up with friends. I left everything behind, and moved to my grandfather’s old farmhouse in Stormville, an hour and a half from the city. Seventy miles from where I’d called home when I wasn’t on the road the last ten years.
I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving, didn’t tell them where I was going, didn’t even tell them I was out of rehab. I just disappeared from one place and reappeared in another, like a magic trick.
I showed up with only what I’d had in rehab: a few sets of clothes, my guitar, and my iPod. Then I set about the business of learning what being lonely felt like. Because being lonely was what being sober felt like. Trapped, forever, in the real world.
That was a little over a year ago. I’d gone into the gardening store out of desperation to do something, anything with my still shaking hands. It was March, the air so dry my skin was crawling, and I wandered the aisle of seed packets in a haze, knowing nothing of times to plant or times to harvest, but determined I would walk out with the promise of something to care about.
The weather-beaten old man who owned the shop watched me stumble around for a while and stare at signs without processing their meanings, then he ambled over and tucked a packet of radish seeds in my pocket. Told me that I could plant them now, and I would be able to see them grow in only three weeks. I wasn’t sure I’d ever even eaten radishes, but he had understood what I needed: to see that my actions had consequences. To see that I could support myself, sustain myself. To see that I could create something again.
I’d expected to feel hope, but when I saw the first sprouts of the radishes I’d planted, I felt a surge of something like responsibility; the knowledge that these things were in the world because I’d put them there, so I had better take care of them.