Excerpt from "D'Amour Road" by Sigrid Macdonald

Although we had been best friends since our late teens, I was always struck by Lisa’s stark and simple beauty. She was everything that I was not: tall, angular, and shamefully thin with a spontaneous, impulsive, and charismatic personality. Her life was full of drama, even though she’d been sober for five years, and worked full time as a drug and alcohol counselor at a small agency downtown called "Straten Narrow."

I, on the other hand, was imminently predictable. I worked as a nurse in the short-term rehabilitation unit of a local hospital. I’d been married to Mark, a professor of cultural anthropology, for fifteen years, which barely legitimized our fourteen-year-old son Devon.

The words that were most often used to describe me were "dependable," "loyal," and "hard-working"—polite euphemisms for "boring." In the past, I had taken pride in those descriptions, but recently, I’d been feeling dull and disenchanted with my life. I was approaching forty. Just thinking those words sent a shiver down my spine.

Turning forty sounded as appealing as being a prisoner in Abu Ghraib. Dead Woman Walking, I mused to myself. I was already sprouting gray hairs and had been making frequent trips to my hairdresser, Chan Juan, to have her color my hair darker. My hair was an odd shade of henna at the moment, but I couldn't change it since I had colored it four times in the last two months. It now had the texture of a Brillo pad and toxic metals were probably seeping into my already imbalanced system.

I had heard the argument that forty was the new thirty, but I suspected that the phrase had been invented by someone in her fifties. If I were lucky enough to live until eighty that would mean that I was already halfway through my life. What had I done with it? Where was I headed? I could be hit by a bus or develop breast cancer, like my mother, who died when I was ten.

Every day at work, I saw people whose lives had been derailed by accidents and illness. Maybe I only had ten or twenty years left. What was I going to do with them? The faster I approached the big 4-0, the more I envied Lisa her relative freedom.

Lisa had never gotten married. She’d had a succession of boyfriends. “Cereal” monogamy, she joked. "They stay for breakfast. Then I kick them out in the morning.” Her tone was flippant but I knew that Lisa wanted stability in a relationship as much as anyone else.

When she was doing cocaine that was impossible. She was involved with one loser after another including men who ended up in jail, disappeared for days at a time, and stole money from her. One even slept with her cousin.

After she began her recovery, Lisa went through a long period of voluntary celibacy to reflect on the qualities she wanted in a mate.

Eighteen months ago, she met Ryan at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. He seemed like a bad bet to me. At thirty-six, Ryan had been clean for three years and attended meetings regularly.

According to Lisa, some people go to meetings but don't actually work the steps, which involve taking one’s own inventory and making amends to those one has wronged. Consequently, the half-hearted members don’t have good sobriety.

Ryan was different. He devoted himself to the program, completing one step after another and volunteering to help other tortured souls who were still drinking. However, he had a history of physical abuse. Ryan's last girlfriend left him after calling the police several times during their domestic disputes.

I had cautioned Lisa about Ryan's propensity for violence but she believed in him. Her whole life revolved around addiction and the program. To have doubted Ryan would have been tantamount to questioning her entire career, as well as her own recovery.

She was like a televangelist since she’d joined AA. Of course, I’d never say that to her. Obviously, I preferred her clean and sober to drinking and snorting white powder, but I didn't understand her need for AA after all these years.

We were both partyers back in our university days but for some inexplicable reason, Lisa crossed a line in her drinking. Alcohol became something that she had to have and it changed her personality. Her grades went down the drain and she was often evicted from bars for being too boisterous, but the next day she’d have no recollection of what she had done.

After Lisa realized that she had a problem, she went to the Addiction Research Center in Toronto, since we both were going to school at University of Toronto. She received out-patient counseling at ARC and they encouraged her to go to daily meetings.