Drunken Mistake

I wish I had those thick curtains that stop any light from entering a room. The frustratingly bright rays make their way through the cheap, flimsy things my mother gave me when I first moved into this apartment. They are black, but that is no matter. The sun still manages to shine just as brilliantly through them as it would were they not there at all. I squeeze my eyes closed as tightly as is possible for me, hoping that perhaps this will make the light go away or maybe put me back into the deep slumber that I lived in mere minutes ago. No luck of course.
As I move myself ever so slightly to stretch with the ultimate goal of making getting out of bed less tedious, a searing pain goes through my right forearm. The feeling can only be described as the sensation of severe bruising along with a peculiar stinging quality. I notice that I’ve got quite the pounding headache as well. Slowly, I open my eyes. After cursing the ever-luminous ball of fire whose presence most people greet with great joy, I glance down at my bed sheets. They are stained with something reddish-brown. I know exactly what it is, but try not to consciously acknowledge it. A wave of nausea washes over me, in part from the dried blood, in part from the source of the headache. I recognize this, now, as the dreaded hangover, the very thing which anyone who chooses to indulge in the pleasures of alcohol surely wishes was not the consequence of the night prior. The feeling is so intense that I immediately spring up out of bed and run for the bathroom as if my life depends on it.
Following several moments of heavy dry-heaving, the last remainders of Jack Daniels and ibuprofen leave my poor stomach. I stay there on my knees, over the ceramic throne, for what feels like hours but is more likely ten minutes or so. I keep my eyes closed, my head inches from the toilet. The smell of my throw up increases my nausea. I puke a couple more times before deeming it safe to exit the bathroom.
I stumble into the kitchen, where I finally muster up the courage to check out the damage I’ve done to my arm. I lift it tenderly and glance downward. A deep gash runs vertically down it, surrounded by several other wounds of varying length and depth. The large one will most definitely need stitches. I flex the forearm. Several of these cuts begin to bleed, including the monster of a centrepiece. Well, I think, this will be fun to explain to the emergency room. “I must have fallen when I was drunk or something… I don’t remember how it happened,” I say the words aloud, tasting them in my mouth. A sarcastic laugh escapes my lips. I’m entirely sure that the nurses will buy that. They’d surely rather accept an obvious lie than admit me to the psych ward overnight. It’s too much paperwork for them.
I find the bottle of generic ibuprofen in its usual home, the cupboard above the sink. I shake it, which is quite silly considering I could never determine the amount of pills in the bottle via that method. I open the child-safe lid. Push, then twist. I examine the bottle’s contents. I cannot tell for certain, but there is no way the quantity was the same as it had been the last time I saw it sober. I hardly hesitate before shaking three of the little red tablets into the palm of my hand. There is no doubt in my mind that my liver hates me. It would not surprise me one bit if it decided to fail me one of these days. I lift the hand with the pills in it to my mouth, wincing as I do so. Only I would forget that quickly about wounds so evident. I swallow the pills dry; as much as I have always hated doing that, it is ever too much effort to acquire a glass of water that I will take only one sip of.
I search for the remainder of my Jack Daniels, hoping for some hair of the dog. Regrettably, however, I discover the empty bottle lying neatly on my fourth-hand kitchen table. Leave it to me to drink an entire two-six without leaving morning shots. Leave it to me to do whatever other fucked up things I had done the night before. I smile ironically to myself. This is the exact reason Ryan doesn’t like me drinking alone. I spend so much time telling him nothing bad will ever happen, that I drink purely for entertainment, and then this happens. Oh well. If I have it my way, he’ll never find out. He needn’t trouble himself with my personal issues. I would prefer if he did not, in fact. I don’t need to listen to him and his worries, anyhow. He’s not my boyfriend anymore. He claims to love and care for me so much, yet he cannot even bring himself to be with me. He makes feeble attempts to keep me safe (from both outside forces and the terrors of my own mind) with mere words. I suppose no one ever told him that “actions speak louder than words.” Fuck him. I could not give less of a shit if I tried.
At that instant, the ever-irritating sound of the iPhone penetrates my thoughts. Rude. I return to the bedroom where I begin to dig through the bloody tangle of sheets and blankets which is my bed. After several moments, I realize that the damned thing is sitting on the bed table. An annoyed sigh leaves my mouth as I lift the stupid piece of technology. My mother wasted nearly eight hundred dollars on the thing. That’s more than a month’s rent on something I did not want nor need. I study the bubble on the screen, expecting a text message. Instead, it is an alarm, which I do not hesitate to turn off. According to this, I have to work in two hours. “Shit,” I mutter. At this, I turn to my mess of a closet and begin to search for the seldom used tensor bandage. I find it and wrap it around the right forearm. I know the wounds should breathe, but it’s quite likely that they will begin to bleed again at work. If there is one thing I do not need, it is Angelina asking why I am bleeding through my shirt.
I find the ugly violet work shirt and wrinkled black slacks that need washing. I slip them both on. Whilst doing this, it occurs to me that I’ve yet to see Kitty this morning. I wander back to the kitchen and shake the bag of cat treats kept on the counter. The fluffy orange kitten comes bounding out of the room I had just been standing in (likely hiding under the bed) and skids to a halt at my feet. She gazes up at me with her huge golden eyes and lets out a soft “meow.” I shake a couple treats out of the bag and place them on the tacky linoleum in front of her. She devours them with haste. I pet her soft back and she purrs lovingly in response. Kitty is likely the high point of my life.
I brush my teeth and fix my hair in the bathroom. It doesn’t take long to decide on a simple ponytail. I do not put on makeup. What point is there even in making an effort today? I check my phone. Apparently all of this has taken me an hour. I put on my coat and boots. The boots are quite worn, and I think to myself about how I should really buy some new ones. I grab my work bag which is ever loaded with my sensible, black runners and the visor to match the work shirt. I detest wearing either of these outside of work. I also retrieve my keys and bus pass. With a goodbye to Kitty, I am out the door.
The bus is late, though that is nothing out of the ordinary. The busses in this city are notoriously never on time. By the time I finally arrive at work, I am ten minutes early, as I make a habit of being. I walk through the door of the ice cream parlour (so very Canadian of us to stay open in the winter) and nod in acknowledgement of Angelina, who is currently with a customer. She smiles in return. I head for the back so I can change my shoes and put my bag away. I put on the dreaded visor as well. I absolutely hate my job, but do not quite for Angelina’s sake. That, and the idea of my mother paying my rent being is just dismal. By the time I am in the front of the shop again, Angelina’s customer has gone. I clock in on the computer and put on some latex gloves, which are required of us unless we want to wash our hands every five minutes.
“Guess what I did last night.” Angelina says, sounding excited and happy as usual. We’ve been friends for twelve years now. Admittedly, if we had met within the past two, it is incredibly likely I would hate her due to her general demeanor.
“What?” I ask, as truly interested as is possible for me these days. She is my best friend and one of the very few people that I do genuinely care about, so I have to try at the very least.
“Remember Alex?” She launches into a long anecdote about this guy she dated for about a month back in high school. Apparently she ran into him at this bar she frequents on the weekends. In her opinion, he’s gotten ten times better looking since eleventh grade (not necessarily a difficult feat in three years) and they are going dinner this Thursday. I am only taking in the most important details, not reallylistening until she mentions Ryan.
“Huh?” I say.
“How are things going with you and Ryan?” She asks.
“Um… you know…” I say, reluctantly.
I feel as if the whole Ryan situation should be explained, just so this is easier to understand. We met about a year and a half ago. He had just turned nineteen. We had both just gotten hired onto this really terrible landscaping job. I didn’t really talk to him for the first couple weeks of the ordeal. I was far more focused on making money, as any eighteen year old who has just graduated high school would be. I was still living with my mother at the time and was hoping to earn enough over to summer to make first and last (plus some spending money) to get a place come autumn.
One particularly hot day, Ryan accidentally dropped a stepping stone on my foot. We had to call into our manager, who told us before we could get the okay to leave work and drive to the hospital; he needed to send some replacements. Our customers that day hadn’t been home, so the two of us had to sit in the thirty degree weather for nearly half an hour before our replacements finally showed up. That company definitely cared more about getting the job done than the safety of their employees.
Ryan drove me to the ER. Three of my toes were broken (did you know that they can’t actually do anything about broken toes but leave them to heal?). Ryan felt really bad, so when he took me home to my mother’s empty house (I believe she was out of town for the week or something), he easily agreed to keep me company. I managed to convince him to go out and buy some beer, on the basis that it would lessen the pain of injury. My real goal was to make it less awkward to get to know one another. That plan worked well. So well, in fact, that after we finished the beer, we started on a bottle of my mother’s red wine (I had a job and could afford to replace it, no big deal). After that, we were a bit more intoxicated than we had planned upon, and somehow, that man I hardly knew ended up naked in my bed.
He was absolutely gorgeous. By that, I do not mean that he was some typical hottie. He was far from it, in fact. He had a bit of a belly and some killer chest hair. The sun had clearly touched his skin in the past weeks we had spent under it, and his tan was becoming more sunburn than anything. No, he was not by any means your average hunk. It was in the way he carried himself. It was the way he could just whip his clothes off without caring what I thought of his body. It was how he was confident about the belly, the sunburn, and the chest hair the way another man may be confident about being exquisitely muscular or a woman may flaunt large breasts and a small waist. He worked his flaws. I couldn’t resist. As he moved his way first on top of me, and then inside, I remember thinking how no other man had ever turned me on in this way in the four years since I had lost my virginity. And I most definitely got around in high school, for lack of a better term. I couldn’t get enough of him.
After that, I didn’t see him again for the week and a half it took for my toes to heal enough so that I could go back to work. Upon my return, however, he asked me out to dinner. I easily agreed, of course. How could I refuse a man who had left such a great impression?
We dated for the remainder of our landscaping job. It was around the time I got my apartment (mid-September) that he finally asked me to be his girlfriend. We were together up until the October that just passed, over a year. He broke up with me. It took until mid-November until we started seeing each other again. He told me he “still loved me, but couldn’t be with me right now.” I couldn’t handle not seeing him, so I agreed to “just be friends for now.” Sometimes, we still acted like we were together. It was and is complicated. Lately, I’ve been acting less and less like I’m still his girlfriend. If he can’t handle the title and commitment, why should I oblige him the things that each entail? So that is the history of Ryan and me.
Back in the ice cream parlour, Angelina says, “Cadie, seriously, you don’t need to keep seeing him just because you two were together for a year. If I were you―”
“I know,” I cut her off, “Don’t worry, I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do.” Angelina thinks she’s a relationship guru. I tire of giving her the satisfaction of “giving me advice.” A customer comes into the shop at this point. I whisper to her, “I’m super hungover. Can we just work?”
She rolls her eyes at this, but nods reluctantly and says, “I just don’t want to see you getting hurt.” This is her standard reasoning for lecturing me about Ryan.
“I won’t,” I finish, turn to the customer, and say with a smile, “What can I get for you today, ma’am?”

The day at work is a long one. Angelina asks if I want to go to the bar with her tonight. I decline, telling her I want to go straight home and get some sleep. What I actually do is take the bus to the hospital. It is a ninety minute wait, so I listen to music on my iPhone (one of the very few features I actually don’t hate). By the time I get to go home, it’s nearly nine. The stitches hurt. I have always hated getting stitches, but I would much rather them than a nasty infection and/or worse scarring.
When I finally get home, Ryan has texted me. He wants to know if he can come over. I am not in the mood for conversation, sex, or company in general. In fact, I’m so opposed to it right now that I do not even take the time to reply. Instead, I feed Kitty, eat some crackers (this is one hangover that just doesn’t want to fade; I am still not hungry), and change my sheets so I can go to bed. I find that both of my blankets have blood on them. I throw them on the floor with the intention of washing them the following day and use a throw blanket in their place. I turn the heat up, put on pajamas, and snuggle under the soft, grey thing. It isn’t perfect, but it will do for the night.
I fall asleep wishing desperately that I had succeeded in my goal the previous night. It is simple enough for one to go through the motions of a regular day, pretending that one does not feel anything out of the ordinary. It is easy enough to hide self-hatred and hatred of your very life itself. As soon as you are alone with your own thoughts, however, these things tend to worm their way back into your mind.

The next day, I have no work to do, nor any true priorities. I awake early unintentionally. When I am sure the liquor store is open, I put on my coat and ragged, old boots and trek over to it. There has been no snow yet this winter, but that hasn’t stopped it from being cold as the Arctic. I flex every muscle in my body; try to take up as little space in the world as I can, in an effort to keep warm.
I walk back home, clutching the bottle of whiskey in the brown paper bag to my chest. Upon my arrival back home, I notice a black car in the driveway. It takes an entire millisecond for me to recognize it as Ryan’s vehicle. Great. I knock on the passenger window. He looks up from his cell phone and motions for me to get inside. I half-heartedly oblige. I realize it has been a while since I’ve seen him. It’s been nearly two weeks, in fact. He’s let his facial hair grow in. I hate when he does that.
“How are you doing, Cadie?” He asks. His attention is not on me, but back on his cell phone.
I almost reply with something sarcastic, but think better of it. I sigh and give him, “I’ve been better.”
He glances at me and my brown paper bag, its origin quite obvious. “Isn’t it a little early to be drinking?” He asks. As if he has any right to judge my drinking habits whatsoever.
“It’s not open yet,” I say; and then, after a moment, “Are we just going to sit here idling?”
He turns the car off and says, “I suppose not.” I wonder why he would even invite me to sit inside his car if we were just going to go inside anyway. Then again, Ryan’s always been a bit of a mystery to me in general.
We exit the car. I unlock my apartment door and we both enter. This is what I get for not answering his text last night. He knows how much I hate him showing up without warning as much as I know he dislikes my ignoring text messages and phone calls.
We are in the kitchen. I barely pause before removing the bottle from the bag. Purely out of force of habit, I acquire two tumblers from the cupboard. Before I’ve even set them on the counter, Ryan, who is now seated at the kitchen table, says, “None for me.”
This comment takes me by surprise, “You sure?” It’s quite unlike him to pass up liquor, even at this hour in the morning.
“Yeah,” he replies, “I’ve cut back a lot on drinking, actually.”
I don’t bother asking about this, as it will surely lead to him lecturing me about my drinking “problem” as he has grown so accustomed to doing as of late. I simply place the second cup back in the cupboard. Of course, I’ve forgotten about my wounds and grimace as the skin around them pulls. I notice a couple small ones open back up and start bleeding lightly.
I must have made a sound or something, because before I can withdraw my outstretched arm, Ryan is next to me, examining it. “What the fuck is this?” He asks. I pull the arm back, mentally cursing myself for not wearing a long-sleeved shirt to bed last night. “Cadie.” He prompts, clearly expecting an explanation.
Unfortunately for him, however, I do not deem him an appropriate recipient of such information. “It’s my business.” I say, bluntly, turning to the refrigerator to retrieve the ice cube tray. I like my whiskey cold.
“I’m serious, Cadie.” He says. He definitely is.
“So am I, Ryan.” He doesn’t pick up on my mocking tone or the fact that I obviously do not want or need to explain myself. I carry on making my drink the way I have done at least a thousand times before. As I take that first beautiful sip, I look Ryan right in the eyes. He has a genuine look of concern on his face. How sweet.
“You can’t do this to yourself,” He says, “You need help.” At this, I roll my eyes and take a huge gulp of my drink. The first one always needs to be downed the fastest, in my opinion. I grab the bottle from the counter and make my way to the tiny living room where I plant myself upon the loveseat (the only piece of furniture I own in this room for people to sit on; I don’t care much for my living room). I gently place the whiskey on the coffee table. I turn on the television, which is playing some mindless crap I don’t really care about. Ryan has followed me in, as I assumed he would. He sits beside me, grabs the remote, and turns off the television.
“Well that was rude.” I say, though I don’t really care.
“Cadie,” He says, voice wavering as if he is not entirely sure of what to say to me, “I don’t understand why you insist on doing this to yourself… Does Angelina know?” I shake my head. “Does anyone?”
With another shake of the head, I say, “You weren’t supposed to either.”
He looks sad now. I don’t want him to be. He shouldn’t be, really. This is not his fault. I did not do this because of him or any other person. It is about me; no one else.
After a long while of silence (I am onto my second glass by now), Ryan finally says just one word. “Why?”
There is so much care and concern in that one word. So much worry and wonder. It breaks me. I don’t want to be like this. I love him as much as I ever did. He cares about me; he wants my happiness, safety, and sanity. He wants me to be okay. I get very close to telling him my true aim in this whole endeavour. I am so close to telling him that if I had had my way in all of this, if some invisible force wasn’t trying so hard to keep me here, breathing, next to him on this loveseat, I would be cold and lifeless right now. I almost tell him why I need to drink so much; why I’ve gotten so close to over-dosing on over-the-counter painkillers so many times (pathetic, I know). I almost tell him everything. I get so close to bawling my eyes out and confessingeverything to this amazing man who somehow has not just gotten up and left.
But I don’t tell him. All I say is, “I don’t know,” with a shrug. I down the rest of my second drink in two large gulps. My head is very buzzy now. Ryan is getting blurry due to the whiskey in my stomach and the tears in my eyes that I am fighting so fiercely to keep from falling down my face.
I can’t tell him a thing. He’ll think I’m crazy. He’ll think there is something wrong with me (and maybe there is). Worst, he may blame himself. I could not bear the latter. This is not about him though. It hurts me to see him so concerned. So when he leans over and holds me, I do not stop him. When the tears finally spill out of my eyes and fall upon his shoulder, I let them. When my arms, seemingly of their own accord, wrap themselves around him, I let them do just that. I close my eyes; let him hold me while I cry.
I am not drunk; just slightly tipsy. It helps me let him do this, in a way. I could never let him hold me like this sober. I can’t do a thing sober. I can’t handle life sober. Who am I kidding? I cannot handle a thing either way. I hate myself. I hate the world around me. I hate my life. I hate almost all of it. Ryan is here though. He and the warm feeling of whiskey in my stomach help. The tears are flowing freely now. I could not stop them if I tried. I hold in the childish sobs as long as I can. When they finally come out, Ryan holds me tighter. I wish I could tell him. I wish he could even fathom the sadness, hatred, and pain that lives inside of me. He never will, though. I will never tell him, not because I do not want to, but because I am not strong enough to share such feelings with a human being like him. All I can do is cry and let him hold me. I want so desperately to tell him every single thing. I want to tell him every pathetic little detail. I am such a mess, I can’t believe it. I wish I had died the other night. I wish I did not feel this way anymore. There, in the arms of the ex-boyfriend whom I still love more than anyone could imagine (but not more than I hate myself), I wish more than anything for the ability to snap myself out of this permanent slum. I just can’t do this anymore.