Hindsight is 20/20 (616 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.19 on 17 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by WrightCopy (View user info) at 2005-08-17 08:42:35 EDT
I'm back in my dorm room. My roommate is on her computer facing away from me. Good. I'm afraid of what Liz will say or do if/when she notices my fat lip. I put my shower stuff down, and look back in the mirror. My hair is manageable again, although my scalp hurts from the many hairs pulled out to make it that way. The makeup is gone. The alcohol is gone. I'm myself again, though with some additional guilt weighing on my soul.
I reconsider everything that's happened. Through the fog of drunkenness, I can still remember it all, and I'm surprised because my father always said he remembers nothing when he gets drunk. I remember how I acted, the stupid choices I made, the girl in the pretty clothes and make up with the outgoing personality. I realize quickly that the key word in my mind is "act." Why did I do this? Did acting like someone else really make me feel that good? Was it worth it, to get this fat lip and nasty hair and the attention of someone who I'll never speak to again, to get all this by sacrificing who I really am? The kind of person that feels the need to be someone else to be happy might be my roommate, it might be my father, and it could even be every other person at my university. I don't care about all them, though, because that isn't how I am. I knew this before I ever tried getting drunk, but the temporary euphoria of having no worries confused me into thinking this was a resolution. But it is all clear now.
I stare at myself in the mirror and say to myself, my real self, "I'm never. Ever. Drinking. Again."
---
My roommate getting out of the top bunk wakes me, but I fake sleep (I've been faking a lot of things in the past 12 hours) so I don't have to face her. I can't face her, not yet. I have to process things for myself before they can ever be explained to anyone else. I hear Liz undress, put on her robe, and walk out to the showers down the hall. I lay on my back and sigh from total exhaustion and a general feeling of being absolutely insane. I get up to look in the mirror at the crazy person I've become. The person in the mirror is far, far from attractive. Her hair is in complete disorder and her lower lip is swollen. I can understand the hair, I had put gel in it to keep it curly, but rolling around in a bed can get hair to look like this. My lip is a mystery. I think back, and it dawns on me: he was an awful, aggressive kisser. He was probably biting on it. I turn my lip inside out and find the cause, a little pink cut. One problem at a time, though. I undress, put my robe on, try to make my hair as normal looking as possible for the walk to the showers. It's going to take a ton of conditioner and a sore head to get this hair back to normal. Plus, I feel the need to wash the foolishness away.
---
I wake up to the guy looking at me, waiting for me to wake up. I look at him, realize just what the phrase "beer goggles" really means, and wonder what made me choose this guy. He kisses me again, and I kiss him back, continuing to play the part even though the effects of the alcohol have long since worn off. My lip hurts and I don't have any clue why. All I know is that I want him out of my bed and out of my room. Eventually he says he has to leave for something, and I've never felt more relieved in my entire life. He writes down his screen name on a piece of paper and asks me to IM him so he can get mine. I actually wonder if she should talk to him, if he's actually a nice guy even when he's not drunk and bragging about his GPA. He kisses me again on his way out the door, as if we were actually in any kind of relationship. I take a random look at myself in the mirror on the back of the door when it closes. My curly hair looks like a rat's nest and I have no clue how I'm going to manage to fix it. I don't care at the moment, I just want to get back to bed to sleep away the grossness that I've forced upon myself. As I lay back down, my roommate hangs her head over to look at me with this look that says all too clearly, "What the FUCK did you do last night?" I shake my head at her, roll over, and fall back asleep.
---
My roommate comes back soon after we arrived in the room. I had been facing the other direction while kissing the guy, and turned around to see her. Liz looks utterly shocked. She puts her stuff down, climbs onto her top bunk, and goes to sleep. The guy doesn't want to stop, but I'm happy for the excuse to. I try to fall asleep, but he keeps trying to wake me up by kissing me, but I'm not having it anymore, I'm not going to be that rude to my first roommate. I try to be cute by putting my finger on his lips and saying, "Shhh!" but I don't really feel cute anymore. I feel disgusting, physically and mentally, and all I want to do now is pass out.
---
We walk into my room and I sit down on my bed, the bottom bunk. He sits down next to me and we continue with the stupid nonsense we were talking about, something about how smart he is, something about Duke, something about how I suck at my classes. Eventually he gets the bullshit out of the way by saying, "How about we continue where we left off at the party?" I knew it was going to come to this, but now I'm sobering up, I'm back to worrying about my fucked up grades, but I don't want to let this guy down, I don't want to look like a tease, so we get back to it. The lights are turned back off, and we're laying down on my bed, kissing like the drunken fools. I keep thinking to myself, "Why the hell am I doing this? He sucks at kissing, Mike is so much better than this, I really wish this were Mike right now. Why am I doing this?" But I do it anyways. He's enjoying himself, I can tell he's enjoying himself because he's making it painfully clear every time he rubs himself against me. I feel like I'm getting a rug burn on my thigh from him. But I don't stop. I want someone to like me, to find me attractive, and here's someone, so I just suck it up and feign interest. I feel like I'm lying to him, I feel guilty for lying, I feel dirty, I feel sad, I even feel lonely, and eventually I make myself feel nothing.
---
The first thing I say once we're outside the frat is the only smart thing I do all damn night: "We're not going to have sex, OK?"
He laughs as if the thought never crossed his mind and says, "Yeah, sure, I didn't even bring a condom anyways." I'm relieved to get the bull shit out of the way and we stumble our way back to my room.
The rest of the walk is for idle chitchat because neither of us knows what the hell we're doing. He brings up (many times) that he as a perfect 4.0 GPA and I (many times) responds with "Wow, that's really amazing," which is amazing to me because I'm doing fucking miserably in the classes that really matter, the ones for my stupid ass major. No matter how drunk I get I can't seem to get that damn fact out of my sorry head.
---
I'm sitting on his lap, not noticing a thing in the world, except for the guys that keep giving my make out partner thumbs up and huge grins. Some part of me is still coherent enough to get embarrassed and I sheepishly hide my head against his neck (if I can't see them, they can't see me, right?). The kid wonders why I'm all of a sudden shy and I say "Those guys, they're staring at us."
"Who cares?" he says, and starts forcefully kissing me again, but again I stop him for the same reason.
"How about we get out of here and go to your dorm?" he asks with an obvious solution to the problem. I nod quickly and we walk out, past my roommate, past anyone else I know, and start walking to the opposite end of campus.
---
I'm standing in the middle of a group of drunk people kissing this guy I don't know but know I'm not attracted to. The music stops but I'm too busy with Random Guy for the moment to care. Eventually my desire to shake my ass takes over and I stop kissing and voice my protest, but the guy doesn't care and starts kissing me to shut me up, very effectively. He moves me over to the couch on the other side of the room and pulls me on top of him, still making out all the while. Somewhere in the back of my mind I think, "God damn, this is fun!"
---
The song ends, and I stop my drunken excuse for dancing. I turn around and, on a whim, kiss the guy behind me, at first hoping that it's Mike, but realizing quickly that it's not, not caring that it's not, and just sloppily kiss him. He kisses back, and though I didn't bother looking at him first, I can tell he's the kind of guy that would feel lucky getting any decent looking girl to kiss him, and tonight I'm hot shit and I'm doing this guy a favor. At the time it could've been a lesbian dyke, could've even been my damn roommate, but I still would've turned around and kissed her the with the same urgency. I don't care who it is. What matters is that this person was attracted to me, he came up to me to dance with me out of every other girl in that living room. I'm attractive to somebody, and for that I'd kiss a dog's ass and still be happy.
---
I can't dance, especially when I'm drunk off my ass (I'm a white girl, what do you expect?), but I don't care anymore. I feel good, free, and happy for once and I'm not going to let a bunch of stares or my self consciousness get in the way of that. So I dance, no matter what crappy song gets played on the stereo. I eventually feel hands holding my waist and I just start dancing against the person behind me, not letting any thoughts like "Who the hell is this touching me?" getting in my way of letting go.
---
We walk down the street looking for the party, a party, any party, none of us really gave a fuck where, especially not me on this night. I was drunk, I was in a good mood, and I was going to have fun. We see people coming in and out of this one frat, I don't notice the name. We faintly hear the bass of some song, and we walk to it. The door's wide open, and the music gets louder. I start dancing and walking at the same time until I find the source. In a small living room are about 30 people dancing, drinking, and having a good time. This is where I'm supposed to be. We all walk in and start dancing.
---
I've gotten myself dressed, primped, and buzzed by 11:00 on a Saturday night. I had asked Mike, who knew me and booze like the back of his hand, what I would like to drink because I already knew I didn't like typical beer. He had suggested Smirnoff Ice, and he was never so right as he was with that. I could never describe the taste, but all I knew was that it didn't taste so much like alcohol that it would make me want to throw up. I could drink them like water, and had four of them the weekend before in a couple hours. I had three so far, and continued to five before the other girls hear there's a party on Frat Row. I put my last remaining Smirnoff in a small backpack along with my keys and ID, the others do the same with their booze and belongings, everyone puts a jacket on, and we're off.
---
I got drunk for the first time in my life last weekend. I didn't think I'd ever become that kind of college student, but I see the error of my ways. I had fun last weekend and laughed my ass off. And it was genuine laughter, not the kind of laughing I had done for the last year since Mike broke up with me, the kind that makes the people around me stop worrying about whether I'm OK. The funk is gone, I feel like a new girl. I could stop thinking about Mike, I could stop worrying about classes, or money, or anything. Why did I ever believe my father was a fool for drinking all the time? It was great. I was in a good mood, I realized Mike was an idiot for breaking up with someone like me, and I was ready to have fun instead of feeling sorry for myself. I knew I'd found my antidepressant.
User Reviews
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2005-09-02 15:18:50 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
not bad, liked the style. too bad is not fictional but then we all make mistakes.
Submitted by satchel (user info) at 2005-08-18 14:05:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
No Comment
Submitted by sideshow (user info) at 2005-08-18 13:39:22 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
I like the Momento style telling of the story. But I think you are lying, you will drink again, and prolly sooner than you imagined.
Submitted by Wrightcopy (user info) at 2005-08-17 10:57:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
This was at UMass Amherst, drunken capital of Massachusetts.
Submitted by BuckeyesTHEGAME (user info) at 2005-08-17 10:48:50 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Stellar. Now it's four.
What school is this, by the way?
Submitted by thorpe (user info) at 2005-08-17 10:08:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This must be the only webpage in the world which features the word "stellar" twice.
Three times!
Submitted by wookie (user info) at 2005-08-17 10:07:00 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
One drunken romp with a less-than-stellar choice of partners is hardly cause for alarm.
Submitted by Wrightcopy (user info) at 2005-08-17 09:48:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
To answer the few that wondered, yeah it is true. There are few things I've done in my life that I regret wholeheartedly, and this is one of them. I kinda wish I could find this guy and apologize to him for being such an ass.
thorpe: I didn't write the "I love lamp" thing, my boyfriend did for me.
cindy: Well, the bunkbeds come apart but the room we had was so tiny that if we decided to put them both on the floor there would have been no room to move. Plus the school had many students (15,000 undergrads) so all the dorms had as many people as they could cram into them.
Submitted by c1ndy (user info) at 2005-08-17 09:37:59 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
not bad. I can't believe they make you sleep in bunk beds at college in the USA.
Submitted by MisterDevious (user info) at 2005-08-17 09:36:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Hope this story isn't true, but if it is, congrats on vowing never to drink again. Too many acts of stupidity put me off the bottle ~21 months ago, and even though sobriety ain't easy, I guarantee you won't have mornings like this anymore.
Submitted by Vulva (user info) at 2005-08-17 09:32:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I liked it.
I am not sure how well it was "written" cause I wouldn't know a poorly constructed story if it fell out of a tree and onto my face and humped it and then asked me to throw it back into the tree so as it would have the opportunity to fall out of the tree the next time an unsuspecting person who knows nothing about writing walked by.
But i liked it so +2.
Submitted by thorpe (user info) at 2005-08-17 09:23:07 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Holy shit.
This from the person who posted the stellar "I Love Lamp".
Submitted by NotSteve (user info) at 2005-08-17 09:10:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
cute
Submitted by BuckeyesTHEGAME (user info) at 2005-08-17 09:09:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
"I'm going to tell you what happened, and then we'll go backwards and find out why. We're going to Tarantino it. So here's what the guy said. He said, 'I'll fucking kill you!' Let's go back. Let's find out why."
Have a +1 for an overall rating of a +.5 from me.
Submitted by ozzy (user info) at 2005-08-17 09:03:01 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Would have been a zero, but for the fact you did something different and wrote everything backwards chronologically.
Hope this wasn't a true story.
Submitted by indoninja (user info) at 2005-08-17 08:54:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
You only made out with him? What a tease.
Submitted by BuckeyesTHEGAME (user info) at 2005-08-17 08:47:08 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Oh yea? Well I killed a guy with a trident.
Check mate, bitch.