I sat with hard iced tea at my desk, a phone on my right and an outlined speech in front of me. I was to make a phone call and leave a voicemail to my teacher, talking about what I’ve learned so far in class. The cold hard iced tea tells my condition: nervous.
Having drunk alcohol three times (a lot on my 21st birthday, one shot right before the beginning of the semester, and the hard iced tea yesterday), I have come to realize how I feel physically and mentally when I drink, and this feeling is clear-cut too.
There is a rumble in my tummy and a slight burn at the bottom of my esophagus. My cheeks toast up and I have a sun burn look on my face: it is void of the sting and the peeling.
My rebellious mind becomes more observantly acute (surprisingly), as if it were an intricate machine made to disprove something widely held as true. But at the end of the day, as I lay in bed after prayers, my tummy still rumbles.
There is a party down there, with streamers and loud music. The beat is well punctuated, though the words are a blur. The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire – the burn comes back at the junction between my stomach and its provider, my esophagus. My room is dark and my bed is warm. My pillow smells of fresh laundry and my mouth is wearing Listerine. I am resting in the clutch between two realities on the nights that I drink and I cannot say that I don’t like it. My skin and the immediate air felt between the hairs all over my body are the physical boundaries and my contemplating mind, the mental.
It’s nice to realize these recognitions of feelings. All learning is – and especially academic learning – the placement of labels on life’s experiences, not just your own, but the collective life comprising those of the world’s inhabitants. Once we’ve labeled them we can talk about them in articulate and organized ways. Learning is something I probably will never stop doing and I signed up for it with my birth certificate.
