I only drank three nights a week, but that was enough to do it. I first stopped drinking five years ago. I don’t drink alcohol because I can’t. Well, I can, but if I do, an infinite mass of possibilities unravels in front of me, only I do not get to choose my destiny. I drank because I was anxious. I drank to experience absolutely everything all at once, to create an exciting, phantasmagorical world on top of reality that was ultimately destructive and selfish. In this pursuit, bad things would inevitably happen, often in blackout, operating quite proficiently in an unconscious sleepwalk.

The missed flights; the disappointed girlfriend; the constant, non-specific gnawing dread from drinking British imperial measurements of toxic depressant every week; the countless infidelities. The dangerous nighttime adventures when my friends had long gone to sleep. Accompanying a man I met on a step by a Tube station – unwilling to go home, pleading with the night, beer can in hand, to fold in on itself and duplicate infinitesimally – to a doorway ominously guarded with an old mattress, the figures within stirring from their stupor and grasping at my pockets, anything of deviating value in this Hieronymus Bosch painting of suffering, a terrifying man with huge black eyes, implicitly the engine of this nightmarish ecosystem, vibrating in his own otherworldly vortex of white-hot aggression.

Asking a man the time while I was lost on my way home from a night out. Agreeing to enter his council-block flat, sitting in solemn silence, sharing a can of Kestrel in front of a tiny TV flickering in the dark before he leaves the room and re-enters inexplicably naked, and, not realising this might be a situation I should vacate, waking up the next day on his floor miraculously unscathed.

It took a litany of ever-worsening scrapes, betrayals and inappropriate behaviour to realise that I couldn’t drink. That, despite being in pubs for the same amount of time as my friends, I did not drink like them. That I drank with a frantic businesslike urgency, like the glass might be snatched away from me at any moment.

Using the obligatory therapy, I spent several years retracing the meandering warrens of my drinking life. I have been to anarchistic meetings in parks in Whitechapel in the dead of winter, sitting on rocks with men with no noses, men with limps and tobacco-coloured hair, men who still speak with the raconteur slur of drunkenness despite not having known the sweet kiss of inebriation for years, gathered in warm communion to laugh and share stories and discuss salvation. I have taken enough psilocybin truffles with Irish pagans to meet God and become love itself. I have scribbled down my fears and hopes and regrets, and endless neurotic sheet music in notebooks, which, when I remove them now from their dusty cupboard, rise up in an embarrassing, swaying tower.

Predictably, I love not drinking, and who I have transformed into without alcohol. It is no surprise that electing not to drink litres of fermented sugar has had a marked improvement on my life. I have gained relationships, projects and feelings that would never have been possible when I was lit up. Very simply, I am happier, and life is better without it. But we already knew that. Annoyingly, it seems that this is true for most people who join the shiny-eyed brigade. But it’s not as simple as that. Despite this, despite the wreckage of my past, despite the cliched self-work, the countless amends and the life I have created for myself, like the victim in an abusive relationship, I sometimes think of the “good times”, and my pulse quickens.

The “four-pint feeling”, rushing on our run, a singular alchemy enveloping everyone, a symbiotic mass cast uncannily in golden light. The unexpected kiss from an older barwoman drunk on whisky sold to herself with my money, so she will keep the pub, the night, the conversation about everything and nothing, the drink, all of it, flowing. Missing the secret Prince gig to spend more time in that beautiful bath of uninterrupted drinking with my friend in the terrible pub directly next door to the secret Prince gig. The boundless nights of eventful, blissful happiness, driven by love and happenstance and “yes, we all agree with you”, but essentially, truly, powered by drinking.

The unmistakable sacred separation between this earthy, smiling, alternative “real” life over here, tonight, now, and that cold, clinical one back there. Booze gives you access to a special window into an exotic parallel night that sobriety cannot provide, however late you stay up drinking tonic water with enthusiasm.

The standing on tables to herald my friends, the six-hour lunches that turn into 12-hour sessions. The nights crashing around New York declining threesomes in bars that actually stay open late. The north London lock-ins interrupted by travellers coming through the windows, the conversations; the uncanny coincidences; the endless uncomplicated laughter; the grand promises made to strangers and gentlemen of the road and four-hour friends.

The circuitry of my friendships and family – populated by Mancunians and Irish – crackles with stories of drinking. There is an unavoidably exciting pocket of myself, a supernatural connection to other pissed people and the ether, that I don’t get to experience any more. I try to retain my membership of the club with my apologetic zero per cent Guinness, the needy fag, the willing participation in The Round, and an active and authentic affection for pubs. But I am no longer inside the great drunken embrace. I am an interloper. I do not feel what you feel.

But I feel what I feel. These fleeting, intoxicating thoughts are pickled herrings. These memories are disguised pangs of nostalgia for youth, warped by the misleading patina of time. They are figments of my imagination.