a couple stories about being drunk

I'm sitting in the basement of my friend Jordan from high school's house. It's New Year's Eve, and I've brought a bottle of wine with a picture of a dog on it, the one that my mom and I saw and gasped at together in the liquor store, and that she bought even though she's allergic to wine and wouldn't be able to taste a drop of it. In addition, I've straightened my hair, and for the second year in a row for New Year's with my high school friends, I've brought my boyfriend. It's the first time in almost two years of dating that I've seen him drink, and it's an odd sight. But an odd sight in the way it's odd to curse in front of your parents and not have them yell at you for the first time. You feel as much a bad influence as a good one, that finally you've convinced them it's okay for you to do something you've been doing all along.

We all get drunk the same way you fall asleep--slowly then all at once. Before I know it, I'm in the bedroom where three years earlier I wore a tight crop top, and accidentally saw my friend's boyfriend's dick, and looked more directly at it than I've ever looked at another one since. 

Everyone says that having sex when you're drunk is a less than positive experience--things get soft when they're not supposed to and hard when they're not supposed to, and everything is sloppy and confident in the way that your first kiss was sloppy and the first time you punch a wall is confident. But in this New Year's Eve with my boyfriend moment, and then in the morning when we wake up together, I don't know what other people have been talking about. Because this is the best time my boyfriend and I have had in a while, and maybe it was all because he was finally drinking and not making me feel stupid for being drunk, or leaning away from a kiss and asking me to go back in the bathroom and do a better job brushing my teeth because my tongue tastes like alcohol and it grosses him out. 

The next morning, we all go to McDonald's together, but my boyfriend and I don't stick around much longer, because we have to get back to my house and watch Walking Dead with my mom or whatever it was we possibly had to do during winter break at my house in Harford County. I don't even think McDonald's was serving chicken nuggets yet, so I probably ordered hash browns from the much less satisfying breakfast menu. Funny how people are always making a big deal about getting breakfast served all day, but never about getting lunch in the morning. 

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I'm in a house party at college. Not my college, at Johns Hopkins, which is down the road a ways. I'm eighteen, and have fallen hopelessly for a boy named Kevin, though he hasn't fallen hopelessly for me. I remember sitting across from him at a table in a bar called Maxie’s, a pitcher of beer illegally between us and the thrill of being eighteen palpable in the air. He grasped my hands like we meant something together, and told me that he planned to have a year dedicated to being reckless, that he wanted to do lots of drugs and drink to excess, and wander around a city that wasn’t new but was new to him. Of course I promised I would follow along those words exactly, I would have said anything to keep him near me, and I knew that my own apprehensiveness about drugs would be nothing but unattractive to him in that moment. So I pictured myself as wearing torn t-shirts and boots with no socks, and waking up with the sun in my eyes and beer on my breath, and realizing I had done things the night before that were worth telling in a story. I was willing to be his little disaster, if it meant he would be mine.

In this particular house party scene, I'm wearing leggings, have drunk enough alcohol with strangers that I'm tired of waiting for Kevin to notice me, and approach him confidently in the hallway of a frat house in the middle of Baltimore, on what technically counts as Johns Hopkins' campus. I'm asking him what his problem is, and all of a sudden I'm crying and realizing I'm drunk and my friends are telling me it's time to go home, and he's walking out the door, and I begin to understand that he doesn't want me, not in the same way that I want him. But I'm drunk and that epiphany doesn't matter. 

He's mad at me the next day, and I want so desperately to impress him, to be calm, to apologize without seeming to sorry. I want nothing more than to be that girl again; the one that he allowed to sit across from him at a table in a little pizza place where he and his sister and eventually me all knew the bouncer and so got away for six months without getting fake IDs. I want to sleep in his bed, and have his roommate be impressed with how easily I can drop a subject when told, I want to inhale how he smells like cigarettes even though I've never before liked the way cigarettes smell when they linger on a person. 

Things finally end between us after a couple conversations I have with my mom and my friends regarding how similar my relationship with Kevin is becoming to the relationship I've had with my dad my whole life. And then also, for more of a wakeup call, one night I come home and he is super drunk and locks me out of his room, choosing instead to invite in a girl I had heard rumors about him hooking up with. I slide dramatically down the wall and sit, letting the tears come freely in front of everyone. His roommates console me, tell me she means nothing, and I believe them, taking those words to this day with a selfish sort of pride and an irritating sort of pleasure. We have a conversation later, Kevin and I, and I've scripted out the pieces that I wanted to say, and he says he hopes we can still be friends and I agree even though I know that that isn't true, and later that night I walk onto campus at 2:30 in the morning and write a poem about pink clouds and my dad and Kevin and hurt. 

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I'm abroad in South Africa, and my best friend and I have made a deal--if I break up with my boyfriend, she will stop smoking. We've both agreed that my relationship with him, despite its longevity, is unhealthy, and I deserve better, and he doesn't treat me the way I deserve. It's ugly and true, and I've been putting it off for weeks, since I found out a few days before flying to South Africa that he hooked up with girls behind my back, after a confusing conversation months prior in which I technically agreed to an open relationship but pretty obviously didn't really want one. I message him on Facebook, and miraculously, he's still awake. Or perhaps his day is still in its early stages; I don't really remember the feeling of that particular time distance. But I communicate with him that I think we need to end things, and it hurts just like I thought it would, and I'm crying in the hallway and my friend Gianna is consoling me, and she's probably wearing short shorts and definitely is super tired, but she's there, and my best friend that convinced me to break up with him in the first place is looking at her phone, afraid to look at me. The next day I see her smoking a cigarette, and I feel more angry at her than I have since we've gotten to South Africa.

A few days and long conversations after the break-up, it becomes easier to relax, and to feel that the choice I made was the right one. I get attention that I'm not used to, and I end up hooking up with a stranger at a music festival; he's brown and his skin is smooth like mine, and my friend Jack looks at him then looks at me, then drunkenly smirks that this guy from the Netherlands is the hottest guy he has ever seen. Jack isn't gay, but I'm glad for the moment anyway. I continue to text my ex-boyfriend regularly, until I finally forget about him. Until I fly home and get dinner with him in the summer, and until I push myself past the seatbelt in his car, ready to take all the power and make him want me, the new different, confident me, for a change. And then I go home feeling empty, and write a poem about the green doors on his green car, lamenting about the ways I feel dirty and needy all at once.