Pounding headache....
and two essays and a bibliography still to do.
Spent last night sitting in my friends bedroom with two of my flatmates, and one of my flatmates boyfriends, all of us dressed as pirates, eating dominoes, until 4am, to make sure she didn’t die of alcohol poisoning.
In a very surreal way it was almost abstract enough to be entertaining, as well as mindfuck level scary.
Last night was also the poster-child of the binge-drink culture.
The drunken, vomit-covered, clothes-falling-off, glazed-eyed, cant-hold-her-head-up-or-eyes-open mess itself.
If every child in Britain was made to stand by our sides last night, they’d think twice before getting in that state themselves.
They’d put down the shotglass and think about how terrifying it is when the paramedics leave and tell you to “call them if she stops breathing”, and you’re counting her breaths to gauge the measure because you’re afraid you’ll miss one, and you don’t know waht to do.
They’d think about the shame of it,the shame of falling, rolling, collapsing on the floor of the SU like a fish out of water, as your friends try to help you up.
They’d think about the awkwardness of where to look when people pass by: the sideways smirks and giggles that you hear so loud, and, even worse, the kindness of the random strangers- the girl who brought the water and had it spat onto her dress, the boy who helped heave her back onto her feet and wrestle her back into the chair when she floundered to the linoleum, the girl who gave us the number of security people who would help get her home, who argued with the bouncer when he said he wasn’t liable once we left the SU and who got snapped at for her trouble and yet who still carried on, even though she didn’t know me or you or her, even though she wasn’t from our building, even though she could’ve easily gone inside to the bar with her friends.
They’d think of the masked frustration hidden behind a mask of practised kindness in the eyes of the paramedics- people who have seen much worse than this self-inflicted stupor.
I wondered, as we inched our way back to Halls, keeping up a steady patter of the kind of baby talk you speak to a reluctant toddler, what they thought of us: students at one of the best universities in the country, the best and brightest minds, privileged and blessed with everything one could need, wasting their time by putting ourselves in humiliating states of stupor in the name of “having a good night out”.
There was the immodesty of it: parts of your body that we girls hide or flaunt as we wish in the name of being attractive, that were now brutally on show for everyone to laugh at. There is seduction in the deliberatly revealing clothing, mystery in shrouded flesh, but here there was no mystery, no seduction. The expanses of skin on show by clothing dragged down or up or off was barely even gendered, not even clinical. Just….there. Repulsivly, embarrassingly there/
But most of all, there was the waste- of our carefully chosen costumes, the potential of a night of music and fun and pounding bass and swirling lights gone entirely to dust, and in its place, a night of stress and strain and embarrasment, and ever-present worry that gnawed at us and kept us from our beds on the cold, hard bedroom floor all night as we counted your breaths and prayed you wouldn’t choke.
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