I just got home. It's exactly eleven, and I'm slightly intoxicated. That slight intoxication that makes your head heavier than normal but your thoughts light as air, harder to catch. I sat on a bench drinking with some older men. They all looked at me as if I were a tropical bird. One man braved saying hello, tipping his drink to me. The others still stared. I stared back. Drinking out of my bottle wrapped in a paper bag. This is a new low, I thought to myself--not about the company, but about the drinking. And not about the drinking, specifically, but that I craved nothing more than to be drinking at that very moment.
I know there are better ways.
I didn't want to come home tonight. Mostly, because of the beauty. The wind and coolness. The nearly-full moon. The few stars.
I also didn't want to come home tonight, because I am once again heavy with that energy just to the other side of sadness--something akin to grief, though I lack a subject to which to assign that grief. I couldn't bare the thought of coming home knowing that I wouldn't be able to sleep, knowing that once I was alone in my room, I would cry, undoubtedly, through the night, which has become my pattern of late.
So, I drink, because I know that drinking always, inevitably, drags sleep to me. I used to do it in college--take shots of brandy before bed. I had a roommate that lectured me once on the habit (she was, of course, right that it was a habit).
Earlier this evening, I went to a movie: The Magdalene Sisters. It was abrasive and stark, opening with a rape scene. It perhaps wasn't the movie I should have viewed by myself in this state of mind, but it is a brilliant movie--real. Heart wrenching. The kind of film that by the time it's come to an end, you're numb, because there's only so much pain a brain can witness before building barriers.
On the way home on the bus, an older man crossed himself and kissed his thumb as we passed a church. I found myself wondering if he had touched a lover with as much gentleness as he performed the crossing of himself. And decided that he probably hadn't. Not recently. His eyes looked too tired, too weary. But, then, how could I know?