Remember When

[14]

drinking

I haven't had a drink in a long time. I wasn't really trying to get sober but drinking on your own is super depressing, so I've just stopped going. I tried to go back to the bars that we used to go to all the time. You only went to bars that consisted of a bunch of older people and live indie bands. I can still remember you dragging me to one on my twenty-first birthday. I expected to be pulled and pushed around by crowds while messily drinking everywhere. Not sitting at a table with only you drinking bottles of beer and listening to three different bands that all had an animal in their name.

A few times after you left, I tried to go back, especially to that one, but it was honestly just too painful. I just kept seeing you sitting across from me, laughing at the old couples trying to dance while drunk. I could just imagine you sipping your bottle before pulling my out of the uncomfortable chair to dance with you, as if we could dance better than any of the grandparents in there. No chance, they'd been dancing for literally decades.

Our dancing was more "high-class stumbling" than anything. You hated when I called it that, but neither of us were very graceful dancing normally; obviously dancing under the influence was definitely not going to solve the problem. We both loved it, though. I even admit that I did because when I was drunk, I thought anything was fun especially if it involved us bumping into each other and laughing at ourselves. 

We stumbled around a lot actually. We lived only about a mile from one of them, so most nights we went, we would trust our drunk selves to walk back from the bar. It seldom went bad, but we did eat the pavement a lot from stumbling absolutely everywhere. We would try to hold one another up, but two drunks can only do so much on their own.

 We were once determined to figure out what type of drunk we were, so we took turns getting drunk so the other could monitor. You were definitely a flirty and sad drunk. You came up to me after getting pretty wasted and asked if I was single. You proceeded to burst into tears when I answered 'no'. All you ever wanted to do when you were drunk was make out with me. You would mumble over and over again about how beautiful I was before kissing me. You tried to use pick-up lines on me a lot, but I would sometimes turn you down just for the hell of it because it always made you so confused when I would kiss you later.

I remember us trying to talk to each other when we were both drunk. We couldn't always understand the words coming from the other's mouth, but we somehow managed to have a lot of really weird conversations. There was the conversation about your parents need to constantly attack me whenever I visited with you or you visited on your own. We even argued over what our future children's names would be. We never tried to talk about the future of our relationship because we never really knew what was going to happen, but we fought for at least an hour over if our daughter would be named Julia or Allison.

Our patio was pointed directly at the sunset, and we used to sit out there when one of us would have a bad day, drinking to our hearts' content. We had super cheap furniture that could've broke from the slightest storm, but I spent a lot of evenings sitting across from you with my feet in your lap as we drank and ate dinner. We hit more sunsets than sunrises because it took a lot for us to be up that early with nothing to do. The days we usually saw the sunrises were the worst, so it made the most sense that we would be drink that early in the morning.

Now that I'm actually thinking about it, we drank a lot. Probably too much for our age, but we did it anyways. No one could say that we didn't have a good time. We could get so wasted that we both ended up vomiting in the bathroom. There was even a good chance that we wouldn't even remember what happened the night before. We were young and stupid and went to college parties once. We puked our guts out but made it out alive. I just know I wouldn't change it for anything.