Hungover
(Disclaimer: This is not from experience, it is simply what I have imagined a hangover to be like, which is why it may be inaccurate.)
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The light pulsated around her, beating on her retinas like a drum, despite how tightly she squeezed her eye lids shut. Each instantaneous flash felt like a gun shot to the head, her screams the roar of the exploding gunpowder. Bang. A gunshot. Bang- another. Whether these lightning-strikes were really around her or made up by her half-delirious mind, she didn’t know. The pain of light was worse than a bullet to the brain, a type of throbbing only a few bottles of Smirnoff’s could produce.
She hated this moment of every morning. The hangover, the living hell of punches to the head and guilt-ridden sobs. She finally willed herself out of her unkempt bed, which hadn’t been made for too many days for her to remember. It smelled faintly of vodka, she thought. Or maybe it was just her. Her head hurt too much to tell. She stumbled out of the tangled, faded blue bed sheets, now stained with evidence of nights when she couldn’t hold her liquor well enough, with evidence of unremembered sins committed with unknown men she’d never recognize again. She fell to the floor, moaning with agony, each inch she moved brought on a new onslaught of gunfire, another bullet to the brain.
After a few agonizing minutes, or, which, for the pain they caused her, might as well have been hours, she lifted her head slowly and, with a tired eye, searched for the one thing that could relieve her at this moment. All she saw was dirty tangles of clothes, cigarette ashes wisping about her in the feeble light coming from her dusty window, cigarette butts and burned out matches, notebooks she’d once studied from splayed across the dirtied ground, spilling their contents across the miserable room. Her desperate eyes continued to search the space, oblivious to the desolation that alcohol had caused her, unaware of the change of her life within less than a year. She tilted her head, and a sudden flash from a corner caught her attention.
There. She crawled across her room, pushing aside the forgotten memories of her past life strewn all about her and forging a roughly straight path to the only source of her relief. Finally she reached it. Her fingers swept away a few jagged pieces of glass, with a few peeling vestiges of Heineken labels clinging to them, and closed around the neck of an intact bottle. She slowly uncapped it, the tiny screeching sound made between the cap and the glass neck sounding like a nail on a chalkboard to her painfully wilted ears. A little bit of vodka lay at the bottom, about three or four shots worth. She slowly licked the rim, savoring the bitter warmth. She remembered the first time she’d ever had a shot of vodka. How naïve, how stupid she was to hate the taste, how painful she found the sting down her throat. Soon enough, though, that medicinal taste became her best friend, that burn more welcome than a cup of hot chocolate on a snowy day or the fire of a passionate first kiss. She tilted her head back, and downed half the bottle in one shot.
After all. The best way to avoid a hangover. Is to never sober up.
The Sunset Path 