t doesn’t taste like anything until it does— like regret, like forgetting on purpose, like burning down what little of you is left. Vodka— clear as truth, but meaner. You don’t sip it, you swallow it whole, like blame, like the names they called you when you couldn’t stand straight. I drank in gulps, like it was air and I’d been drowning all week. On the porch, in a friend’s car, behind the school— wherever silence could hold me while it hit. It came in a glass bottle with an almost empty bottom and no warnings. I poured it into a plastic bottles, used again and again. You learn the warnings on your own— how your stomach knots up but you keep going, how your voice gets louder as your soul gets smaller. By the fourth shot, I was laughing at things that werent funny. By the fifth, my lips stopped working right, I was telling strangers i loved them, and meaning it, because love is easier when it doesn’t need to last past sunrise. The night blurred into a smear of neon signs and wet pavement. I don’t remember walking home, just waking up with the bottle tipped over like it had tried to escape too. My throat was raw, from yelling or BJs I don’t know. My head a war zone. my hands, still shaking— still reaching for the one thing that made me feel invincible for just a moment before it made me feel nothing at all.