BY PAUL KELLY
I was still drunk when I woke up that morning. The clock had reversed on my liver though and I was at least 3 drinks behind to getting back to where I was when I passed out the night before. I picked up the bottle of whiskey by my bed and took a swig. It felt good to be like this, alone in this room, with the curtains shut, and drunk enough to not care that I was alone and shut off from the world. It was better than sleep, it was better than the nightmares or worse, the happy dreams that were far beyond reality. It was better than lying in bed with eyes closed and having every single mistake in your life pound the brain again and again.
The remnants of the bottle did the trick and got me back to sleep until 4pm. I had a date at six with a woman I had met on a dating app. She exchanged messages with me frequently and found my self deprecating replies funny. We met at the station. She was a few pounds heavier than her profile picture had been, but it didn’t rob anything from her beauty, and what she wore oozed confident sexiness. We took a walk to a small square in the area with rows of bars and restaurants on each side. She wanted wine, I wanted beer. We made a compromise and found a German beer bar restaurant that served wine. She asked if I was hungry but I told her I had eaten already. It was a lie, but I’d rather be hungry than sober. I saw other customers with large oversized beer mugs. I wanted one but when my order arrived, what I got was just a regular size. She got her wine so she was happy with that. She was somewhat quiet and kept asking me to talk. I told her I wasn’t the most talkative person and it was better to ask me something. It was my mistake.
Her mistake was to ask the question “so what happened to your last girlfriend?” It was the last thing I wanted to talk a bout. It was the thing I was trying to avoid in my waking hours for the past year. It was the thing that had me day after day drowning myself in whiskey. By the time I reached the end of my story she was crying her eyes out. Eyes from other tables flicked over to ours, customers getting shown to their tables gazed down at ours as they passed by.
People looked at my date with sympathy and at me with disdain bordering on disgust. Why was she the one crying when it was me who was feeling all this wretched pain. I leaned back in my seat and stretched out my hand across the table t o comfort her. I wanted to be anywhere else but here right now. I didn’t want a constant reminder of my own feeling, bawling her eyes out right in front of me nor for everyone in the restaurant to think that I was breaking up with a woman I had just met and was on a first date with. I ordered another drink to ease my burden. She ordered another wine. I got the same regular sized beer I didn’t want while the waiter filled her wine glass to the brim.
Fuck my life.
