Despair filled inside me as I finished the last drop of the bottle. I stared, stuck in a trance, at the empty Heineken in my fidgety hand. Thoughts and unwanted memories bloomed in my mind. Fuck, I’m remembering again. I need more. I want to forget. I don’t want to remember what happened.

Desperately, I plundered my “secret stash” that I had collected over the year and yanked out another bottle of the devil’s water. My bottle opener met the cap halfway.

Clink. Hiss. Pop.

As I was chugging away, new but appealing thoughts surfaced. I feel better. Even great. I want to keep drinking. I want to keep forgetting. When the second bottle was finished, the horrendous drinking cycle continued, and continued on for 3 years in high school.

I hid my troubles from everyone. They would not understand. They could not. Not my friends, not my teachers, and definitely not my family. I was alone. No, scratch that. I had only one “best friend” left…

Alcohol.

I was only 14 when I started drinking and alcohol had already became a necessity for living. A crutch for my sanity. A memory block for the trauma. But at the same time, alcohol ate away at what made me David Jin. I became more temperamental and insensitive to the people around me. The number of friends started to dwindle. Arguments with my family increased. Gradually, the more alcohol I consumed, the more that alcohol would consume me.

Around junior year of my high school, my girlfriend at the time completely cut ties with me. She couldn’t handle who I had become. A shell of I was. For me, it was a wake-up call. Introspection (and unfortunately a lot of drinking) followed suit. I had realized I had driven away every single thing I had loved and every single person that loved me…including her.

Depression enveloped me. Thoughts of suicide and regret crowded in my head, like angry protesters chanting to kill myself over and over. Why continue living, David? You have nothing left. It’s all your fault.

Yet, I did not go through with it. A suppressed memory popped in my head. A memory of a promise I made a long time ago. Continue living with or without her, no matter how hard life becomes. And I’m not a person that breaks promises easily.

Now, coming into my third year at UC Berkeley, I look back at those drowning years with a grimace of relief. I’m no longer shrouded in darkness nor am I constantly hammered throughout the whole week. Some relationships were fixable while for others, the damage was unrepairable. Though, now I live my life without the constant need to have alcohol by my side. I’m finally, no longer “best friends” with alcohol.

However, the temptation still exists and I’m afraid it will continue to exist. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. As my current girlfriend would explain it, alcohol is an “escape from reality," the idea of which sounds alluring to those who have grown to despise reality, just as I did. However, the thought of losing everyone again, is a thought I do not want to be realized again. And for that fear, I know I will not falter in my struggle against alcohol. I will never go back to that never ending cycle of drinking, knowing willingly if I do, I’d end up back in the same state I was before, and sink back into that dark bottomless hole with no way out in sight.