It was at some mixer or birthday or one of those things. I’ve never really been good at telling what type of party I’m at. I was standing with your friends that I came with and didn’t really know well. Watching the crowded mess of people stand around and drink and talk,trying desperately to be funny. Not me them. They were trying to be funny. You were talking to some guy; some guy’s name I forget now. I knew the guy, though. You had talked about the guy, at some point, in length to me many times. I know he had cheated (in his opinion not cheated) on you with his girlfriend. I was watching you talk to him. In my head, I remember having a beer. But, I couldn’t because I was twenty, and we were at a bar. And, I remember having to get a red bracelet at the door because I wasn’t twenty-one yet. And, not drinking the whole night, I remember wishing that I were trashed. That I was the type of trashed where you aren’t really sure if you are asleep or just trashed.
But, there I was drinking my Bud Light, watching you talk to this guy, when your friend I didn’t really know said that you would probably like me to meet the guy you were talking to.
I thought this was because you and me were kind of on a date, and you wanted this guy to be jealous, to see that you were with some other guy. That’s what I thought. I didn’t know that we definitely weren’t on a date, which I would later hear back through a five-friend chain, and that you were in love with this guy. I was your good friend.Your good friend that you had high opinions of and wanted to like this guy too.
I don’t remember him. I’m sure he was nice. I’m sure he had deep blue eyes that make you feel like you’re a part of everything that is important and big. I’m sure it’s now hard for you to imagine those feelings you had for him that night- the mixed and equally consuming feelings of lust and infatuation. It’s not hard for me to remember how I thought of you on those nights. Spring in the south always feels like a room after you’ve had sex in it. That’s why I remember the feelings, I think; they felt consummated. I felt like we were already in a full fling. That we had secrets about each other- that we both were sharing with each other a side we had grown accustomed to hiding.
I liked you drunk. I remember that. You reminded me of the first girls I ever got drunk with in high school. Smiling, for the first time letting yourself think things you aren’t supposed to think around boys. You moved in slow motion, with an increased intensity. Maybe you were normally that way and that’s the way you appeared to me when I was drunk. Either way.