I Know When It Ends

Coffee and booze is a strange combination. They say it makes for a "wide-awake drunk," whatever that means. All she knows is that she's energized with a mostly-empty bottle of wine in one hand.

Drinking by yourself means you're an alcoholic. She's known that for years, and it's why she's never drunk alone before. She doesn't want to be like her dad, who was drunk no matter when you showed up at his house. It's what killed him in the end. She vowed she would never be like him, but she never pictured this. It's impossible to know what or where life will bring you, and this image just never crossed her mental multiplex. Okay, so she wrote it in a fiction once...and she knows fiction is based on reality...but it wasn't her reality. It was someone else's when she wrote it. Now she's brought it home.

Is that what happens? Is that fiction? Something imagined, or perhaps heard about at a distance, that is to be brought home at some point after it's been implanted in your brain.

She wonders if she'll remember this later. She often remembers more than she hopes she will when she's drunk. She makes conscious decisions, ones that she knows she'll regret later, knowing she can claim not to remember them the next day, and thus shed some level of responsibility.

Gin, a mudslide, and a bottle of white wine are not a good combination. She knows that very well, having mixed alcohol before and sworn never to do it again. But she's too far gone to care, not from the alcohol, but just from life.

Yesterday was so good. Today is so bad. Last time, it was the other way around...yesterday was so bad, today was so good. Why is it always that way? Does it have to be? Does a high require a low, and vice versa? She hopes not, but is so afraid it's true. What if the happier she becomes, the more depressive she needs to be to balance it out?

If that's a trick of the universe, it's fucking unfair.