ANONYMITY by Paul Hostovsky

Remember that alcoholic you tried to help, the one you took to those meetings, those meetings you were attending yourself because you needed help stopping drinking and the only way to get it, they said at the meetings, was to give it? Remember those boxes he asked if he could store in your garage because he’d just lost his apartment and was basically homeless now? Remember how you made a place for them in a dry corner near the bicycles and Christmas decorations? Remember how he promised he’d come back for them soon, but then he stopped coming to the meetings and months went by and soon it was winter, the boxes huddled in the dark against the cold? Remember how you made it through the holidays without a drink, then asked around at the meetings but no one had seen him? Remember how you thought of looking online for an obituary but you didn’t even know his last name--because anonymity, they said at the meetings, was the spiritual foundation of all their traditions? Remember when you decided to open the boxes, just to look for his name, and (Merry Christmas!) what you found were hundreds of albums and CDs: oldies rock and jazz and folk and blues, many of them rare and out of print? Remember how you carried them into the house and took them out one by one and made a list of the titles and listened to all of them over the next sober weeks and months and by the time you celebrated a year clean and sober his record collection had merged with your record collection? And someone at the meetings said he was dead. Are you sure? Yeah, they found him frozen to death last Christmas in a snowbank. Remember the brief shock, then the sweet relief you felt wash over you, thinking only of the records and yourself? Remember how that sweetness soon turned sour, how it started to burn, how you couldn’t listen to the records anymore, the pleasure gone now? Remember how you ended up selling them all for a thousand bucks, then ended up picking up a drink, then ended up spending the money on booze and drugs, then ended up back at the meetings, where the help was, the help you got by giving it away?

Paul Hostovsky's poems and stories appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com