to find her on Facebook but didn’t have any luck—for all I know, the ID might have been a fake. So I put on clothes and walked in a hungover stupor to the bar the random girl had brought me into and left it there—I said it looked like mine so I’d taken it by mistake. And then I just avoided that bar for the rest of time. I still have no idea how that bag ended up in my purse. I hope I didn’t mug anyone.”
He squirmed a bit, gently shook me off his shoulder, and rolled onto his side. “Are you a mean drunk? Is that why you stopped drinking?”
He said it teasingly, but I felt myself blush. “I guess. Back then I was, at least. My friends used to joke about having to keep me ‘on-leash.’ ”
He snorted. “What’s funny is that normally when you’ve had too much to drink, you wake up feeling like you’ve done something bad even though you haven’t. But I woke up with a busted-up face. And you woke up with someone else’s bag. So the guilt response was correct.”
“I know, right?” I giggled again. “I looked into that, too. Your serotonin receptors are all messed up; basically gives you depression for the day.” I fitted my elbow over his waist and sighed. “I don’t miss that.”
“Why did you stop drinking?”
Impressive that he’d made it this many months without asking, really. “I had this disastrous thirtieth birthday when I had way too much to drink,” I said into his neck. “I finally put two and two together that…I mean, you’ve probably seen my pill bottles around, I’ve been on a few different things for depression and other stuff and yeah, I finally decided that alcohol wasn’t really a helpful chemical to combine with my fucked-up brain.” I normally avoided this entire topic—the stimulants as a kid, the benzos in college, the antidepressants now. That I don’t remember life without mood-stabilizing drugs, that I’m not entirely sure who I’d be without them monkeying around with my neurotransmitters. But I was feeling so open, vulnerable.
“What happened on your birthday?” he asked.
“Well, I’d invited people over, and there was a huge snowstorm that day, so nobody came. The only ones who made it were my friend Tessa and her husband. He left early because he had to be in court the next day, and when it was just Tessa and me…” My face burned. “I blacked out and got kinda mean. About how all my friends sucked and she’d turned into a Smug Married and stuff. I said some terrible things; she didn’t speak to me for days. They weren’t even true, I don’t know what I was talking about. After that I was like, ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.’ It hasn’t actually been that hard. My life doesn’t revolve around drinking like it did when I was younger.”
He was quiet for a second. “Well, I don’t think your brain’s fucked up.” He lifted my knuckles to his mouth and kissed them.
I laughed. “I mean, thanks. Obviously I’m…fine. But I miss it every now and then.”
“If it’s not an actual addiction, maybe you could just have one? I always figured you were in AA or something.”
And in all these months, he’d never asked. Which probably said something about the seriousness of our relationship. “No, it’s nothing like that. So maybe. I don’t know. I don’t really wanna keep talking about my…shriveled and blackened brain.” I added a little bravado to show I was joking, but it fell flat. After a moment, I slid my limbs back and got up to make us coffee.
* * *
At my desk, blinking at a story about radicalized Algerian immigrants, I fantasized about whether anyone would notice if I just stopped doing my job. I’d still show up, of course, moseying into meetings and making small talk in the break room; I just wouldn’t produce anything. The thought experiment left me feeling pretty unmotivated, so I convinced Damien to venture out for lunch with me. He gossiped about the junior editors as we walked; I think it bothers him that there’s a younger, hipper clique of gay men on staff now. I figured we’d bring our food back to the air-conditioning, but he insisted we eat outside even though it was 100 degrees, so we plodded to the Elevated Acre, a bizarre rectangle of Astroturf tucked between office buildings. Businessmen in suits were splayed on the fake