Do parents understand that the real party only begins after the party has ended? Do they understand that when they accept the invitation that is a sleepover post-party, they’ve actually just assigned themselves the role of designated house to sneak out of and back into? Do they concern themselves with such facts, do they lean into the spectacle of it all by setting obstacles like a fly screen door that creaks upon opening or windows that are impossible to wedge open from the outside?
Whatever the case, I can’t help but think that Darnley Street house was the greatest challenge and my parents the most unsuspecting victims of all. Any other sleepover proved uneventful. The floor plan was greater, the addition of multiple floors a coveted barrier from sleeping guardians. But in that decrepit house with its crumbling bricks and wooden floorboards that let out an exhausted sigh when pressed, the challenge of sneaking out loomed like a Ninja Warrior course. Every obstacle had to be calibrated, every movement a calculated sequence of body positioning, weight distribution, and level of force exerted.
We spent twenty-five minutes just trying to get past that fly screen door. The trick was to press down on the handle only half-way, then swiftly pull it open. If you timed it right, the creak would be minimal to non-existent. Take too long or draw the handle too far and you’d practically be sounding out an alarm to the whole street. When all four of us were out, we allowed ourselves to breathe in fully. It was the scent of freedom. The night was still, the houses undisturbed. And here were four teenage girls, a bottle of Midori and a goon bag tucked under the arm, legging it down the hill, onto the bat bridge, and up past the station.
A phone buzzed with a message confirming their location. Our laughter cut through the silence of the streets, laced with an undercurrent of nervousness as our proximity drew closer to the opposite sex. On the tennis court, they stood in a towering circle. At our arrival, their actions grew more animated. One of them took to jumping over the net only to get his converse stuck and stack it. Few were watching when it happened but in his sunken expression I felt the heat of second-hand shame. He didn’t say much the rest of the night save to nurse a wounded arm and bruised ego.
Even now, I don’t know why we ever bothered to sneak out. Half the time it felt like the meeting of two repelling magnets: the guys staying on their side, us girls sprawled in a circle on the other. Did we even talk to each other? Did we even know how? But in these interactions lay a goldmine of entertainment for the ensuing school weeks. A flicker of a spark would emerge for two people, a movie line quoted would serve as an entry for Facebook messages that soon became a daily occurrence, the last sip of Midori offered by an outstretched hand seemed to suggest chivalry was not dead. We would run back home as the first light of morning bled through the sky and hit the pillow with mouths dry and heads wobbly.
What followed the sneaking out and subsequent hangs on tennis courts and dimly-lit parks and abandoned train station tunnels was the Sunday hangover. We would stay cocooned in bed, surfacing only for food and Gatorade that was passed around the mattress and left our mouths sticky with the sheen of sugar. With so many in the bed you weren’t sure where your limbs ended and another’s began. Our voices were heavy with fatigue, our eyes still smudged with the remnants of mascara. Despite the pounding on the temples, the conversation persisted. We placed every interaction from the night before under a microscope so as to better deduce interest and meaning. We talked about everything and nothing at all. We had a sense that such events were ending, that the time would soon come where school no longer guaranteed one’s fixture in another’s life. But for the moment, the closeness that stretched between us was all-encompassing. Anyone else would call it a wasted day, but to sit in each other’s company, peeling back layers upon layers to expose those soft underbellies and parts of ourselves one can only do with close intimacy, it felt like the world’s greatest gift.
You can go eleven months with no-one knowing your business but as soon as you hit mid-December, the phrase, “I don’t drink” comes to punctuate every conversation. Christmas parties are prolific. In the office, a popped bottle of champagne signals pens down for the day. From the desk to the pub, stilted conversation between colleagues turns animated. Play your cards right and you might just return the next day to newfound friends waiting for you at the communal coffee machine. Mates you haven’t heard from for three months begin peppering you with messages to “grab a drink” as though your relationship is a Subway loyalty card that must be stamped before December 25th. They demand your year in review in the space of an hour. It’s exhausting. It’s all too much and not the mood.
When I tell them, I say it with an off-handed casualness, as if alcohol was a flavour I simply don’t care for. I tell them some bullshit like “I don’t like the taste” or “saves me money, I guess.” What I don’t tell them is that I can’t drink alcohol like they can. I don’t tell them that I have a mind that eschews talk of balance, that moderation is not something that comes easily to me, that I very easily slip into a mindset of ‘all or nothing’ and don’t know when to stop. I don’t tell them about how much the smell bugs me, that breath thick with the aroma of beer takes me back to that alleyway in Spain where all you could hear were those shitty Pitbull remixes from the nightclubs next door and that man, ramming my body against the wall with a hand at my neck while the other tried to undo my belt.
I should just tell them the truth of the matter, but I suppose even I struggle to articulate it. ‘Wellness’ has hijacked everything in our culture and with it has come a rise in the sober-curious. It’s a good thing, I think. To be more mindful of your relationship to alcohol, to know it doesn’t have to be so intricately woven into the fabric of your social interactions and that so much life can exist without it, there’s good stuff here. But I found myself getting irrationally angry all the same. I hated the idea that not drinking was something people were able to flirt with so casually, that the stakes were so low, that alcohol was a cheap dress on a mannequin someone could try on briefly only to think, “eh, not my style.”
I know, I know. It’s just a label. But that word sober…it carries weight, doesn’t it? To attend a meeting is to talk to those who don’t have the luxury of approaching their sobriety with curiosity. These are people who have hit rock bottom in the most dramatic fashions, people whose bodies still shake with uncontrollable thirst. Theirs is hard work, which is daily work, which is the careful and considered act of abstinence, a tally of accumulated days and hours and minutes that carry all significance.
It all made me think sober was a title you had to earn. I didn’t use it because I felt like a knock-off version, a discounted imitation of the original. Because I wasn’t even drunk and a man pulled him off me so it wasn’t even rape and all these excuses that added up to suggest my experience wasn’t even that bad, that it wasn’t alcohol that was the common denominator but my own negligence. There’s so much lost in that, though. Next week, I’ll have been eight years sober. I approach it like anything else in my life: something I work hard at, daily, and in private. I don’t think it’s particularly interesting at all. But in keeping things close, in not sharing, there is no-one to celebrate with. Equally, there is no-one I could potentially help.
Eight years sober and still I wonder: do I want this forever? Wouldn’t my jokes be all the more amusing, endearing, loveable when delivered over a candlelit dinner with a bottle of wine to share? But I know myself. I knew it before I first tasted alcohol. I knew it in those early morning runs and after-school interval sessions during cross country season. All these things that were celebrated as the stuff of someone motivated, someone exercising discipline with regards to their training and a quest to get better at this sport they loved so much. Really, they were just the byproduct of someone who couldn’t switch off that part of themselves that thought more was better, that affection and love were something to be earned. I ran to escape. I ran to switch off that outside noise and focus on my own thoughts. I ran to silence my thoughts. I ran to feel loved. I ran away from love. I ran and I ran and I ran and for what? I always came back to the same place. I always came back to that wobbly head, even devoid of all alcohol.
That’s the thing about sobriety, or maybe life in general. The trajectory is already mapped out for you, they want you to hurt and then learn something and then speak of the new-and-improved you, the Better Version 2.0. They want you to excavate your pain and turn it into gold. Not drinking doesn’t solve all your problems, though. I thought I could detach myself from them with the ease of simply trading vodka for soda water. Eight years on and I’m still failing, still saying the wrong things, still struggling to love people the way I should. I still feel lost, unproductive, and directionless. I’ve still gone home and slept with the wrong people simply because it’s more convenient than articulating all the reasons I don’t want to.
But it’s also true that not drinking doesn’t close you off from that world of shared intimacies and confessions that once accompanied ventures to tennis courts and train station tunnels. You don’t need a hangover to simply lay like a vegetable and enjoy someone’s company. It is the furthest thing from a day wasted.
Beautiful, harrowing, sublime. I loved this piece, Jess. I spend a lot of my life thinking, talking and writing about my own relationship with alcohol, as well as reading the words of others… and this has to be one of the best. Thank you.