On New Year’s Eve, a Grown Man Will Weep for a Teenage Girl

CONTENT WARNING: underage drinking, sexual situations.

Pretend you are a man named Seth / You are 6’11” / You are 31 years old / You live in a house with two barely 18 year old girls you are not related to / Their names are Sierra and Gina / You party with them often / You always buy them silky liquor that tastes like pencil shavings / You ask both of them to do homework with your daughter, who is only 7 years younger than them / They always say yes /

Pretend it is New Year’s Eve and you are throwing a party for all of their friends / There are 32 people in your three bedroom house / There are two pregnant women / There are fourteen of Sierra’s husband Kevin’s friends screaming oorah intermittently / Only one person is sober / It is not you /

So you, Seth, look at Sierra and say chug what’s left in this handle, and Sierra doesn’t let you finish the sentence before the fireball runs through all 10,000 of her taste buds at once / She yells for someone to bring out the whiskey / Later Alex, running through the front door, screams something about bringing jello shots / Sierra throws back four in a row, which you think is not an impressive feat /

You are all drunk / You are enjoying this moment of flexible cognizance / Alex flew over the marble countertop and into the glass wall of a mirror / snippets of shining reflections on the ground / You have forgotten what it is like to be alive until you watch Sierra tuck your daughter into bed /

This is where you, Seth, realize you are not immortal / When you see an 18 year old girl chug too many shots of fireball / When you realize your daughter is only 6 years away from that being her / When you see that people are more than just caricatures of random events / When you see yourself in the glossy eyes of an 18 year old, wearing a Van Halen t-shirt, pretending she has ever heard any Van Halen song, hoping that she can drink enough to forget something / 

When you try to understand why an 18 year old who fakes knowing things about Van Halen would want to be drinking with a 31 year old man anyways / When you remember that you are the one who showed her how to march the wasted march from door to door without crashing into the walls / That you showed her how to pop a bottle cap without using your teeth / That you turned on Metallica for her for the first time while you walked her through smoking her first cigar /

For a moment, you let yourself pretend to be that 18 year old girl / You swirl into her mind, let yourself think that you, too, are invincible / You forget that life is unfair and focus on the next round of shots / Bend down and tie your shoelaces, fall onto the ground, have some other party goer reach into your shirt saying he’s helping you up / Feel like screaming but laughs it off / Cannot become the deadweight of the party / Cheat on your husband with Alex because you owe him for the alcohol / You want to break out of this scenario / You don’t deserve to /

But you pull yourself back into the now / Back into your own face, Seth / You want to take the fireball from her / You want to pretend that you will do what is best for her / You want to learn what it is like to be a father instead of a drunk just for the next fifteen seconds and then plunge back into the role of the drunk /

You want to pretend you are in a world where / you walk over to her, and instead of daring her to chug the fireball, you drive her home / a fantasy home / somewhere that is better / somewhere that is not Anderson, South Carolina at 2:23 am / and you tell her to forget / you, Seth, were ever there / and that she was ever there / and she does /