Leaving Myself Behind
A series about drinking
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***
You know those bubbles that race to the rim of the glass after a heady pour? Up until eighth grade, it would've been apt to say that they held more brio about the act of drinking than I did.
But I knew the taste well. There’d been sips from green bottles on late nights in summer, when school seemed a long-gone burden. Secret cheers of champagne between cousins, where amber fizz sloshed in plastic flutes.
Every time, it tasted like cleaning spray.
Then, at thirteen, something changed. Getting drunk became my most important quest.
Why? Because other people were doing it. Because it seemed like a way to become more fun. Because puberty brought a mountain of self-loathing, and I longed to like myself again.
I’d been thinking about it for weeks, mulling it over with my friend Ellie in the ripped-out paper notes we passed between classes.
Where should we do it? Your house? What will you tell your mom?
In the end, it was easy. Our mothers never called each other, and if her mom tried, the phone would’ve rang and rang through the rooms of my house, unanswered.
On a Friday in the middle of March, Ellie arrived at my locker and leaned in close. We were on the third floor of the old brick middle school, which sat high on a hilltop overlooking town. Behind her halo of brown hair I saw through the Tudor-style window the signs of spring emerging. Flawless blue sky, pine boughs swaying in the light, grass sprouting between scabs of snow.
“Carson’s place. Saturday,” she whispered.
I shut my locker and felt possibility rush through me. Crossing this threshold of adulthood was a goal I wanted to reach with Ellie because she was the friend I most wanted to be like.
Experienced with boys and booze in just the right ways, she was also smart and respectable without trying. The nerds and party kids loved her, but so did parents and teachers. The real reason I adored her was because I felt in her a blanketed beat of sorrow I so often felt in myself. Unlike me, though, she was committed to carving out the life she felt she deserved. I saw her as an orb of light pulsing through my own night sky.
The sun went down, came up again, and there I was at the party: sway-dancing on the coffee table, lacy push-up bra peeking out a scoop neck tank, mostly legs, swigging a bottle of Bacardi Grand Melon.
“This is so good!” I yelled to Ellie. “It tastes like watermelon Jolly Rancher.”
“I know!” She giggled. Ellie was easier to set into a fit of laughter than anyone else, which left me feeling hilarious and interesting. She tossed me her scrunched-up-nose smile and took a swig.
We took turns this way, releasing hot, crumpled breaths every time we passed the bottle off.
The party was in a lofted barn apartment that carried an ancient smell, like rusted iron and horse fur. Converting a building for animals into a dwelling for humans was not only common in our town, it was practical. The barn was just up the road from our county’s only Walmart, meaning it was a primo location for any last-minute needs (solo cups, pong balls, a 30-rack of Genesee), or perhaps an aimless rendezvous beneath the fluorescent lights if the party got boring.
The room filled with the noise of shoes on the old wooden floor hitting bluntly like drums siphoned of vibration. The door to the corner bathroom opened and shut, opened and shut. The air molted with the balm of teenage underarms and beer breath.
When half our bottle of Bacardi was gone, I decided seen was what I wanted to be.
I imagined the boys at the party wrapping their strong arms around my lower half, pulling me off the table, and revealing to me my burgeoning womanhood.
Certainly, I wasn't ready for that.
What I wanted was the feeling of control. I wanted to incite their desire and know that my body was exactly what they yearned for. I wanted to know that I was the pinnacle of their intrigue while keeping my own secret: from them, I needed absolutely nothing.
The world went black.
I opened my eyes to another pair of eyes clenched shut, centimeters from mine. A tongue, not my own, swirled around my mouth. Two hands wandered over my back, a pair of legs entangled with my own.
I pulled my face away and looked at the state of us. We were on the floor in a forest of feet. There were heels and knees and asses, no faces. The toe of a cowboy boot stepped sideways, sent a beer can tumbling across the planks.
I turned to the boy I’d blacked out atop. He attempted a sly smile. A high schooler? I’d never seen him before.
I bent my knees and began to rise into an all-fours position.
This is when I felt the sticky wet spot hardening on the back of my jeans. I knew before I looked that it would be a reddish-brown, the color my art teacher might call burnt sienna.
The worst hue of red on earth.
***
It had only been two months. The first time, I was too mortified to tell my mother but terrified of trying a tampon, so I’d sneaked a panty liner from under the sink before school. I thought I could take care of the matter myself, clearly unaware of the enduring, enormous nature of a period. I bled straight through my skirt that day and ran off the school bus with my backpack covering my rear.
“Alyssa!” I shouted at my big sister from the toilet. The bathroom was painted sky blue with two paintings of bright pink flamingos, echoes of Florida to remind my parents of their homeland.
“Well, that’s your problem right there. Panty liners are for lighter days.” Alyssa pointed under the sink to a puffy pink package. “Use these for now. You’ll get the hang of it!”
She closed the door softly, let me and my budding fertility be.
I unfolded the pad and taped the wings primly into the crotch of my underwear.
Trying not to give myself away, I practiced walking around the bathroom, saying “Hi!” and “How are you!” and “Oh my god, really?” as if I were exactly the same as I’d always been.
The whole time I felt the flamingoes staring down at me with stony eyes.
***
Now, at the party, I was ill-equipped to manage the lagoon unspooling from inside me. I’d been so eager to get to the party and make myself drunk that I forgot all about this new, important part of myself.
What am I going to do?
Then, an elbow hooked into mine and pulled me up to standing. “Hey hon. Com’ere.”
The strange girl guided me into walking, but I couldn’t focus on where we were going and didn’t want to look anyone in the eyes. We arrived at the corner bathroom and she locked the door behind us. I could see she was a punk-rocker chick, with blonde, boob-length hair parted down the middle.
Older than me, a sophomore, maybe. She had hoops in her lip, her nose, her eyebrow. Black eyeliner that looked like it’d been there for days.
“You’re a mess.” She held out a plastic Walmart bag. She didn’t seem drunk at all.
I took the bag and peered inside to see the familiar pink package. “For me?”
“Yeah, for you. You can change into these, too.” She handed me a pair of large fleece pajama pants that were pilling and worn, but clean.
I surveyed the plastic bag, the pants, the girl.
She looked into my eyes more intensely. “You okay? You got it?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Thank you.”
“No worries.” The girl swiveled toward the door so she could shut me inside to clean up, but before she did, she gave a small wave that said both hello and goodbye. “I’m Missy.”
I didn’t realize until she left that the receipt was still in the bag.
What kind of person would spend their own money just to help a stranger, a disaster, like me?
The kind of person I would never be.
When Ellie and I finally sobered up and left the barn to catch a ride home, it was early morning. I wore the pajama pants from the stranger, blood-soaked jeans in the plastic bag, atlas of my womanhood traced upon them.
I thought back to that moment when I awoke from my blackout. To lose control in such a way was foreign to me, as was the idea that self-imposed incoherence could be an excuse for nearly any kind of behavior. I watched the frozen farms drift by and recalled the dancing, the kiss, being untouchable.
The allure of drinking finally made sense to me. People did it because it meant you could become anyone you wanted. I decided there wasn’t a single wish I wanted more. That desire to transform myself would soon render me a chariot of yearning, a disciple of my own oblivion, a dogged, unstoppable force.
I forgot about the stranger, the act of kindness that tried to save me from myself.
I forgot that I was just a girl.
“atlas of my womanhood” 😮💨💗
This is the kind of honest writing I'm here for.