Prompt: When you're in the darkest of darkness, that's when your priorities are reordered.

Sometimes when you’re overwhelmed by a situation, when you’re in the darkest of darkness, that’s when your priorities are reordered.

Black out snow socks

I woke up in a stranger’s apartment. It wasn’t a hook up. I was fully clothed and asleep on the couch under a linen duvet. But something told me I wasn’t where I was supposed to be so I ran home in the snow

I fled the apartment in my socks. My thoughts were swirling in the snow globe of my brain in such a way that shoes seemed superfluous. It was only half a mile or so and I’d taken the walk many times before: after last call, slipping across Fort Collins’ icy sidewalks in a stupor with my roommate, feeling morally superior to our drunk-driving peers and also environmentally superior, the way one does when recycling wine bottles after a binge.

We'd been to Tang’s, a club who’s main redeeming feature was its penny beer night on the last Friday of the month. Becky, a co-worker from the junior’s department at Sears, had invited me out after close and then ditched me for a guy at the bar.

I hadn’t remembered any of this upon awakening. Someone had been calling the house all morning, letting the phone ring and ring before giving up. This was still a pre-voicemail era and our answering machine was on the fritz. It was a wonderful time when you could ignore people almost indefinitely and still pretend to be innocent: "Oh, you called? I must have been out."

I did finally pick up after about the fourteenth ring. Becky wanted to know where her keys were. She had given them to me before hooking up so that I could walk to her nearby apartment and crash. I told her I’d left the keys on the table by the aquarium.

Apparently, Becky didn't have an aquarium.

I had stumbled into an unlocked apartment somewhere in her neighborhood and slept on that person’s couch, under their extremely soft blanket. I tried to piece it all together, but the scenes were hazy, like looking through a steam covered windshield in a car with a bad defroster.

What the owners thought when they found a pair of women’s size seven and a half shoes and a set of keys on their credenza? Nights like these were part of the tipping point a few years later when I thought about getting sober.