One Drunk Night Recalls Another

I'm drunk tonight and, as is so often the case, reminscing fondly of other nights I've spent in the same (or, at least, a similar) condition. I've been to bed already and found that every time I closed my eyes long enough to drift away, I'd smile. Half-conscious smiles, lips cocked slightly to the side against my pillow, accompanied by a low moan of contentment that bubbled out of my throat, muffled by my lips, and made me feel almost foolish. Almost. I'm drunk, after all.

I was thinking of you, naturally, and while all my memories of you are fond, drunk or otherwise, two in particular have stood out all night. They may be my favorites. Something I find odd, even now, as they're so wholly different from one another.

I recall the first acutely, though the details have become stretched through re-tellings and re-livings in the small number of years since the night it happened. I don't remember it so fondly for the experience of driving drunk (and needlessly, I might add) to the hospital or the sudden, chilly onsent of autumn in North Carolina that made me wish, as the hours went by and the booze began to wear off, that I'd brought along a jacket for you. I don't remember it so vividly because it was the first time I'd ever seen you cry and, amusingly enough, the first and, to my recollection, only time I've ever seen you naked.

No, the fondness of the memory only started with wandering in to find you fully dressed, and showering, when you were allegedly brushing your teeth. Finding myself in the shower with a beautiful woman in the middle of the night, still more than a little intoxicated, peeling off clothes to get at the monitors left adhered to your skin and thinking, vaguely, that in any other situation I'd be surely much more "clumsy" with my hands. The simplicity of crawling into a bed more suited fora toddler than two grown adults, the way you nestled between my body and the badly painted stone wall, curled up on my chest and fell asleep. That is the beauty of the night. That handful of minutes that crept into hours as I fell away from consciousness and woke to find you still there. Intimacy, whether romantic or platonic, has always been physical for me, despite my glibness of tongue and savvy wordsmithing. A touch, a look, is always more profound than the most heartfelt string of words. Hard to admit, but true.

Those hours of comfort, of trust, and closeness, are perhaps the most at peace I have ever felt.

The second night, I recall, ended with a scattered pile of my belongings tossed from a second-story window. I remember it not because I looked up at you, and at my clothes and assorted possessions tumbling haphazardly away from you, like a dumbfounded, jilted lover. I remember it for the look of pure mischievous amusement that remained on your face through it all. Clothes I don't ever remember giving to you and things I don't even recall fell away from your face until you disappeared from the window without a word.

I remember feeling a tumultuous mixture of laughter and fury, of confusion and sadness but, above all, a powerful desire to know what in the Nine Hells you were doing. I wanted to laugh and cry and slam my fists against the brick until I'd battered the walls down, or scale the building until I could crawl into your room and shake you until you answered my questions. Instead, I gathered my things and marched them back to my room. Until two days later when you arose and, laughing, took them back where they belonged.

I laid in bed tonight and thought of these things. Of dozens of talks, of six-hours walks that carried on into the encroaching dawn. Of four hour drives to a beach an hour and a half away and writing your name in the sand. Of horrendous downpours that struck the second we turned toward home. Of innuendo that slipped so easily between us, and long looks that convinced at least 800 people that we were bound to be crazy about each other.

I thought of them and felt a pain unlike anything I've ever felt before. A longing so powerful it hurled me out of bed and into my chair to write until it receeded like floodwaters in the weeks after a hurricane. Except it hasn't disappeared. I'm still here, 18 hours and hundreds of miles away, thinking and wondering.

And it suddenly occurs to me that it doesn't matter. The miles and the hours and the years between the nights I remember and tonight. It doesn't matter because the way I love you is so incomparable, so indestructible, that I never fear for a second that it might vanish alongside that longing. I may be wracked with the agony of being so far removed from all your waking moments, and I may tremble at the sheer depth of love I have for a friend, for a relationship that started with a pretty girl stealing my beer and, despite having no money and no beer left, not saying no because she seemed so earnest about wanting to try it for the first time.

I may feel those things, and all I'll do is smile. Because you are all the Order and the Chaos, the intimacy and the occasional fit of mischief, the bright things and the dimly remembered revelries, that make up what I love most in life. So another one for you, in this vast and multi-colored Rubix Cube.

Let's give them something to talk about.

Yours Always,
-S.R.