Forty.
Déjà vu started to become an awfully frequent feeling. I'd spent the entire day drinking, crying, throwing up, drinking some more, crying some more, throwing up some more. By midnight I'd finished the bottle of who-knew-what and gotten through about half a bottle of something else, that may or may not have been vodka. Or anything, really- I was too far gone by that point in time to be able to tell, and I still hadn't turned on a single light. At midnight I finally felt almost numb, and fell asleep.
I got up anywhere between midday and three the next day. The blinds were shut and I didn't care enough to consult a clock or even my phone. I put "Titanic" into the DVD player and brought a blanket to the couch. I nibbled on corn ships with salsa and drank something that tasted an awful lot like Tequila. In the light of the screen I could faintly make out the label- it was indeed Tequila. So my taste buds weren't completely gone then, I thought, taking another sip.
Two and a bit hours and half a bottle of Tequila later, I'd bawled my eyes out over the movie and stumbled off the couch towards the TV set. I needed a break before the next soppy movie, so I switched from DVD to television. Football came on. I knew this wasn't a good idea, but I couldn't help myself. My hands wrapped so tight around the neck of the bottle that my knuckles were turning, I sat on the floor right in front of the TV and just stared. From so close, I could see every single tiny pixel, and the brightness stung my eyes like a thousand little needles- on fire. But I couldn't take my eyes off one of the players. It may have been due to the amount of alcohol I'd consumed over the past forty-eight hours, but he resembled Benn. Very much so.
That could have been Benn, I thought. He had talent, he always had. When we were just fourteen, he went to Dublin and even Sweden to play for the English under sixteen's team. He was the youngest player to ever make that team, and they did well too. He had so much potential, and after that he was under close watch by a number of elite clubs. But he threw all that away a few months later, when he, and I, as a lot of kids we were friends with at the time, got caught up in the wrong sort of crowd. Drinking and, every now and then, drugs, wasn't really what clubs were looking for in their underage hopefuls. Then he started playing and training less too, until he lost every last serious club's attention. I wouldn't know if he really cared, he didn't really talk about that sort of thing, and our relationship was, to me at least, kind of iffy at that point in time. We broke up for the first time pretty soon sometime around then.
I felt my stomach complaining again, and jumped up to run to the toilet.
&&&.
It must have been around ten or eleven at night, and I couldn't sleep. So I began to watch "The Notebook" - arguably the most girly and emotional movie of all time. In the beginning, it made me happy, as the characters fell so madly in love, and the bottle of something that sort of tasted like rum I'd meanwhile moved onto, sat on the couch table- untouched; its place in my hand taken by a box of expensive chocolates my parents would probably have killed me for eating.
But, unsurprisingly, my mood began to change as the movie went on. The chocolates were gone and the rum was disappearing rather quickly too. Noah and Allie... That could have been Benn and I. What if, one day, I realised you weren't what I really wanted? What if I realised I loved Benn as much as he loved me, I just hadn't wanted to admit it? Or to fall in love at all?
My usual self would have said something along the lines of "don't worry, he'll understand; and he promised to always love you, and he probably will." But as I felt the onsets of that thought, reality kicked in. Unlike Noah, Benn wasn't working his butt off at ridiculously low rates to buy a house I'd always dreamed of the two of us owning. He wasn't thinking of me. And he would never, ever be fixing up a house in the outskirts of town; waiting for my return- Benn was dead.
