Spices (FIRST DRAFT) ~ An Alejandro and Alfred Story

𝓣𝓮𝓷

Waking up the morning after New Years is hard. Your head is pounding, pressure building up like someone stuffed a dozen cotton balls through your nose and into your brain. You have no energy yet are desperate for anything to resolve your unmanageable headache, nausea, and thirstiness.

I've gotten used to dealing with hangovers on my own. I had plenty of water bottles in my room, some ibuprofen bottles, and no one was going to work that day, knowing well people are recovering from a night of celebration.

I lay in bed, continually drinking water, exhausted and out of touch with reality, zoning out. I only had to get up once to throw up. Regret marinated in my mind. Drinking so much alcohol wasn't the right call, New Years or not.

~~~

Evening came quickly due to me sleeping in well into the day. Hunger pains my stomach. I hadn't eaten all day, but I couldn't get myself to get up. I was still feeling weak and unwell, with unexplainable anxiety making my heart throb with overthinking about my life and recent events.

The thing was, my hangover was gone.

A new thing was making me sick. So sick that for hours, my muscles are tense, and when I realise and relax them, they ache. I sweat whilst in loose clothing, my cheeks hot and burning, I blink less, almost mentally unconscious. My heart beats faster, each thump like a low heavy footstep of someone running, and my stomach turns and turns and turns, and I feel vomit building up, but nothing will come out.

I should sleep it off, but when you are so shocked by your condition, neurotic and stressed, your mind will almost never shut off.

It is especially hard waking up the morning after New Years when your best friend kisses you the night before, minutes before the clock strikes midnight, and said best friend is the one thing keeping you awake.

There is no old trick, pill, or cure that can heal you from the aftermath of that. Said person will invade your mind every minute, hour, and day. The image of them will be burned into your head, and every time you set your hands down to touch something, you think it's them. They become everything around you. Even the simplest things you could do every day without difficulty seem like the end of the world.

This person has now become your sickness, a new, plague-like disease no doctor can treat.

Each breath is dedicated to that person. You hear their name every time your heart beats, and each blink convinces you they will be there when your eyes open.

The phone rang multiple times as I lay in my bed, wide awake, sleepless. I was too petrified to pick it up. It could be him, but it could be Millie checking up on me or Georgie asking how my night went. The stakes were too high, and I refused to risk my life.

~~~

As much as I wanted to be swallowed by my surroundings and never return to the outside world again, a person can only go so long without food, so I forced myself to get up and head out.

Usually, I would go to Casa Vallarta for dinner, but this time, I physically could not. Instead, I located an Italian restaurant.

I tried to forget the past event the best I could. I can't let it affect my life like this. It isn't right.

I thought about my job, how I can occupy myself, what tasks I can assign myself, and in the midst of doing so, the waiter arrived with my food, disrupting everything I was focusing on. I had almost forgotten where I was, and my heart throbbed hard against my ribcage.

The routine of receiving my food from Alejandro made me expect him to show up, and the lady waiter, who possessed brown curls, distorted the image of her own face.