Mistress J weighed heavy on my mind. Goddamn her. Her and her wretched games. I brought a bottle of fireball whiskey to my lips and took a prolonged swig. There was no burning sensation as I drank it, no bitter flavor or bite. I’d had too much alcohol that night to experience delicate, human sensations such as taste. The cinnamon-spice liquor no longer really tasted of anything, just a profound blandness, smooth and gentle like water as it slid down my throat, into my stomach, and then through my small intestine.
From there the toxins would be absorbed by itty-bitty blood cells, then come towards my already jittering liver, who was trying with all his might to prevent that poison from reaching a point of metabolized oversaturation in my bloodstream. He wouldn’t accomplish his objective, not if I could help it. It would be a long night, the kind of night that turns to early morning and then before you know it the sun is shining bright, it’s already noon somehow, and the hangover is kicking like a violent, backseat child on Adderall and your body is screaming bloody, visceral murder at your brain.
It was going to be that type of night, the night that could possibly end all nights. I lowered the bottle from my lips, screwed the cap on, then brought my left hand to wipe off a lone dribble of brown liquor that had descended to the bottom of my chin. I dropped the bottle on the ground, deciding to give myself a very small break, a brief respite from my destruction. I really didn’t want to die just yet, that’s what she would want: Mistress J. I imagined her standing within her latex suit, leather whip dangling from her right hand, watching the television, smiling her perverse-twisted smile as she saw a newscast about my unforeseen suicide.
The newscaster would say something about a mental health epidemic within our college-education-system, and they would show my parents crying in the background, all as she cackled like some manic witch bent on destruction. My glazed over eyes were now looking up at the ceiling as if god were hidden deep in the plaster. I looked up searching for answers, trying to find a hidden shepherd to show me the way out from my twisted despair, perhaps god was hidden in the plaster… I saw nothing. “I’ve got to get out of this spiral,” I thought, “make it so the memories won’t drag me back into this path of destruction.
I have to get over her. ” I lay on the grimy, mucked up ground of my dorm room. Piles of papers, dust, and crinkled- polyethelene chip bags were scattered across the rugs. I was on my back with my eyelids twitching, the skin lids only coming halfway down, partially covering my pupils, then darting back up again…. A few minutes passed with me in this semi-conscious state. Then another few. My heaving chest started to calm, and for a brief moment I was completely relaxed. My heart stopped beating so frantically. My mind went placid.
I was able to get my thoughts off of Mistress J, that devil woman, and have them go completely blank. Tabula Rosa. The quiet had descended and it felt as if the synapses in my brain had stopped sending electrical signals between one another. The world became a muddled pool, my vision completely dark, and the only noise that I could hear sounded like a distant tide, as if someone were holding two sea-shell up to cover both my ears. When I was lying there, drunk as hell, completely out of my mind, for a brief moment I was the happiest I had been in a long time.
Not close to actually being happy, but not perpetually dangling on the abyss of self-destruction, like I had been for the past few weeks. No, I was wallowing contentedly in my pool of nothingness, a whiskey bottle lying next to my head, and that was as close to happy as a person like myself could have gotten. My lips were cracked with dried blood and alcohol-induced sweat stains had formed crescents under my armpits, but in the moments when my brain seemed on the brink of death and was filled with mephitic muck that made me unable to think or remember, the memories didn’t assault me.
Eventually though, the light of the world came roaring back, and reality became all too visible again, the memories of Mistress J started to emerge once more. Goddamn her! My right hand shook with earthquake like tremors, so I brought the whisky to my spotted, broken up lips for another glorious sip. Some people would probably say that I was already at an adequate level of intoxication, that any more would be all-too dangerous, but I planned on drinking more, much more. Ignorant, mundane people spew swill like that for words, but they just don’t know, they can’t understand.
When you meet Mistress J, when you experience what I’ve experienced, then and only then can you tell me to stop drinking. With my hands, because my feet felt far too wobbly and unstable, I pushed myself over to my dresser and propped my back up against it. I leaned my head back against the third drawer from the bottom, trying to get myself comfortable. My whole body ached like a beaten dog. I felt like utter shit, and maybe that’s what I deserved. I grabbed the trashcan beside the dresser and vomited a mixture of vodka, whiskey, and burger king chicken-nuggets into it.
Everything was numb and sore and tingling, and I felt cold, so goddamn cold. My vision was a blur, completely hazy, as if some sort of thick, viscous fog had descended upon Willard Dorm Room 514 and caused the world to turn completely uncertain. Rays of light came down from the dorm room ceiling and refracted like little daggers in my eyes, and the small box of a living quarters I was trapped in seemed suffocating. The lights were bemusing and bustling, and the room kept darting around, as if I were a passenger on a Japanese bullet train riding through a bright, dazzling city, the lights streaking past me wildly.
I felt wobbly, but was still conscious to the world. I remembered Mistress J and her madness, her games, her plots and foils, they were all still present, even as the world began to spin. I didn’t want to feel like this. Even an obscured world, a distorted world, was far too much for me to handle in that moment. I wanted an utter darkness to consume me. I wanted a pure, placid, consuming black void to ensconce me, drowning out my mind and the complications that go with being me and doing the things that I’ve done. Drink more, forget more, get rid of the heavy, burning pain. Nothing here made sense.
I was lying on the ground completely destroyed, mentally and also, due to my own abligurition for poisoning myself, physically. The back of my skull rested against my dresser, a little bit of blood oozing out from moving my head back against the drawer too quickly, hitting it on a sharp, protruding edge. I reached over for my bottle, brought my hand up, and wrapped my lips around the fireball bottle’s spout as tight as a baby boy glued to their pacifier, just trying to find some sort of comfort. This scene really shouldn’t have happened. I was eighteen on a Friday night, young and with a full life in front of me.
I should have been at a frat party, chasing some girls my own age. Yet all I could think about was some thirty year-old whacked up secretary, in an apartment downtown, completely out of her goddamn mind. Mistress J and her insatiable sexual appetite. She was probably enticing some other poor kid, getting him caught up in her web of lies and deceit. How had I been so stupid, with her and all the others? I had been going downtown multiple days a week to have affairs with women who were sometimes twice my age. Yes, I intended on drinking more that night. Much more. Until I forgot.
I shook my head, brought the bottle up to my lips, and guzzled down the soothing, salubrious alcohol. In my hazy fog, I grew more depressed and lonely. For a moment, I don’t know why, but I wished I was with my mistress again, by her side. But then I remembered what she did, and realized that there were other options in our miraculous, modern world. I could find love, momentary love at least. So I grabbed my laptop and brought it over to my bed. I opened it up and started searching through the internet, looking for a girl to chat with. I recalled reading an article about a site where you could chat with strangers online.
I went there, created an account, and started my attempt to find an attractive woman. My red, sweaty, inebriated face stared into the camera longingly, like some old, dying dog looking for attention in his final, brief moments. My eyes looked like stained red glass, murky and shallow. I clicked past a variety of desperate, lonely men, not fully realizing that I was perhaps the most lonely and desperate of them all. Finally, I found what I was searching for: a gorgeous Brazilian girl, brunette hair, thin with tanned smooth skin and edgy tattoos. She was absolutely amazing! Exactly what I needed in this time of desperation.
I walked in the corner and took another drink to give me a confidence boost. And just like that, with the power of overindulged alcohol and the possibility of online sex, I had found a new girl and completely forgot about Mistress J, momentarily at least. As I stared at the screen, beginning to converse with an apparently spectacular woman, there was a little voice somewhere in the back of my head screaming, “don’t, don’t, it’s a hoax,” that wasn’t being completely received due to the faulty wiring of my brain, which was functioning about as well as an overheated hard drive soaked in a bathtub of water.
The neurons in my brain were so fried that electricity quite possibly could have been coming out of my ears, amped up to the point of a Motown-junky on a binge. She didn’t speak to me. No voice came out of the computer. She never asked me my name and never said hers. At the side of the screen there is a box where you can type out text. She only used that to communicate. I just stared on with my glazed eyes, accepting this wonderful turn of fate. “Let’s get naked,” she typed. Immediately, without waiting for my response, she slid off her shirt, then bra, then pants, and then panties, as I stared on in a dazed wonderment.
My eyelids were drooping, drool was dripping down from my mouth, wending downwards to my chin. “This is amazing! ” I think. “Completely unprecedented that such an attractive girl would ever want to just randomly have internet sex with a random guy. This is a once in a lifetime moment, the kind a man has to take advantage of. ” I took off my shirt and my pants and then my underwear, as quick as I could. I then stood completely nude, on a webcam, in front of this mysterious, heavenly lady.
