GreviousAngel

The constellation of my family had been shattered in less than a year. I left for college, had a lost Summer and just barely avoided going to prison with with my boyfriend, an experience I sobered up and ploughed through the semester. When I came home for Christmas, that year, I found I was rich, or at least what I though to be rich. My mother had been on her job just long enough to qualify for life insurance and vest for most of her modest pension. In addition, Lloyd, who had off and on belonged to a union, had named me as his beneficiary. I had the presence of mind to call my ex boyfriend, Drew, who gave me the number of his family's "money guy," who something with it, the upshot being that I wound up with a large check for something, and a checkbook that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

I'd like to say I took the proceeds and went to college and bought a house, but I didn't. I set out to celebrate. Just one drink.

My next sober moment came almost two years later. I woke up, or came to, in a hospital in Amsterdam.

I drank my way across Europe. I had a passport from a previous trip to England. I'd loved it, and contacted my host family in London. Their warmth lasted exactly a week, after I'd stumbled in drunk again. They politely asked me to leave, but no matter, I'd hooked up with tall, skinny Aussie on his way around the world. Scott never seemed to feel the effects of drinking, no matter what what we drank. It dawned on me at some point that this was because he was easily twice as heavy as I was, and there was no point matching him drink for drink. I forgot this as soon as I realized it.