teenage dirtbags
I got drunk too many times in a week. I wanted to believe that the imbalance, the perception that everything was slowing down, flowed in like a relief. But in reality I felt weird and sad and drinking was the one thing that seemed readily available, but even that didn’t make me feel much better.
At midnight, my friends and I wandered around the city like it was ours. We swigged vodka from the bottle and swished it around in our mouths. If we were hungry, we’d go to this fast food joint that was open at all the strange and lonely hours of the night. It was frequented by homeless people, people who slept in the booths and carried their belongings in fabric bundles. Once, one of my friends tried to make a joke to one of them. He had this limitless ability to find humour in almost everything. But when he spoke to strangers, he would get this earnest, innocent expression on his face, the kind of which you only really see on children.
Going to the club felt like a resolution, even if it wasn’t. It always came with the unfulfilled promise of forgetting – it was easy to think that the pounding music and flashing lights would chase away the things you didn’t want to know. There was a window, you could look out and see stillness, even amidst the great writhing body of people.