Gone Sour

I’m awful on whiskey. My boyfriend says my eyes glaze over. Presently, we are having a conversation about my mom that is like pounding dead horse flesh, and I am trying very hard to either look away from him or make steady eye contact with him in order to appear sober. Appearances fail me. They always do - my eyes are too big and my face is too narrow. Nothing feels worse than imitating what you should be.

Sober. I should be sober. I have a habit of posting to social media while intoxicated. I also have a phone addiction, so that I’m glued to the screen for most of my banal days. I pushed my phone away from me while drinking the whiskey sour, the one that saw me pouring out ice for another one and rehashing the aforesaid horse flesh. I did this to appear ‘engaged’ in our conversation. While we spoke, I could feel my body vibrating. I had posted a risky post on social media just minutes before, and I knew it was a mistake. I had known it before I’d hit “publish.”

While I remained not engaged while trying to appear engaged, I couldn’t stop thinking about the post. My mother had been abusive, but not like that. Had it been physical? I don’t know. I remember the door slamming, the screwdriver that came out and undid my bedroom door frame so she could leer at me and my oval face. I didn’t drink when I was nineteen and I wasn’t sorry to pour my mother’s whiskey down the drain afterwards.

I had a bad habit of slamming metaphorical doors. I had shut out my mom years ago.

Her email to remind me to cash her Christmas check was not going to be enough of a reason to get me to love her again. I needed so much more, so much more that while I hit the “publish” button on my post, my phone dropped to the floor from the slam of my fingers hitting the button. Slam. A sound and a plea.

While I sipped my now fourth whiskey sour, I heard my phone start to vibrate. I’m sorry, I told my boyfriend. I’m getting a phone call.

I didn’t know multiple notifications, sent a hundred times over the course of a minute, could create a kind of seemingly permanent vibration mode on my phone. The responses to my post were angry. Unfortunately for me, there is a “dislike” button on this social media platform, which, incredibly, people press in all seriousness. Not that this wasn’t serious. Child abuse is, well, a big deal.

I had now abandoned the conversation with my boyfriend. I looked again at the picture that had sparked the hundreds of negative comments. It was a picture of my bedroom door unhinged from the wall. I had said something in the caption about screaming into the darkness of the past. This wasn’t going to end well.

I thought back to the previous moments, however long ago they were to the present moment, and why I had hit the “publish” button. Is there a reason why we do anything? I thought about the human psyche and decided I was drunk.

Even then I couldn’t cut myself off. My boyfriend resumed our conversation, unknowing. He didn’t use the particular social media platform and would remain oblivious of my post forever, because I would never tell him. Perhaps real life beats the social media game. In real life, the “dislike” button is merely ending the conversation. I thought back to the moments that had preceded this moment, and thought about how I had ended a tangible conversation with someone I loved.

It was my mother. I had ended the conversation with my mother.