Making It Up as I Go

The last twenty-four hours are just a collection of objects and names and places I grabbed because they stuck with me. A bottle of Bacardi, something that tastes like fruit and pure regret, a pastry nobody should eat that late at night, the people I was around, the rooms we landed in. André’s apartment in Landsberg, this red light district we kept wandering through, TV shows on disc, a swimming pool, a pink vibrator left behind somewhere. Party pizza. The whole thing is still sitting in my head like I’m still actually there.

The night was genuinely out of control. I was running on black coffee and whatever clear-but-colored alcohol I could reach, some chemistry experiment that made perfect sense for about five hours and then stopped making any sense at all. Drove across the city in clothes I shouldn’t have been wearing because someone played a card in UNO and it felt like that card held the answer to something. Black Eyed Peas at full volume. I texted someone a birthday greeting and only later realized I’d already texted them yesterday, which tells me I wasn’t really present for most of that night. When I finally crashed on a couch for a few minutes, I dreamed about underground tunnels with architecture that didn’t follow any rules, very Harry Potter, except the people in it were real and I had sex with someone named Anna even though she has a boyfriend, but your brain doesn’t care about details like that when you’re asleep. André’s heading to California. That was how we said goodbye.

Now I’m home from work and still wired from some Caramel Macchiato that tastes awful and makes you feel alive in all the wrong ways. I could fall asleep standing up right now, but I’m not missing Camp Lazlo—this stupid cartoon about a monkey who goes to summer camp. I actually love it. The way everything about it just works. Happy birthday soon, you ridiculous person. Eighteen years old now. That’s something.