26 Ways To Drink Whiskey
Alone, when you are sitting at home listening to records, and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” comes on and you think of him, and you wonder what he is doing right now, and if when he hears this song, he also thinks of you.
- Neat
- With water
- On the rocks
- On literal rocks, like at the beach or in a park, wherein rocks are the dominant physical landmark
- With friends
- With one friend you very much want to be more than friends with, and there is this gnawing anxiety that you originally thought would wane as you built up a healthy store of liquid courage, but in fact, as things become more intimate and more relaxed, and the possibility of telling the other person how you feel begins to draw closer as a real thing that could happen, you begin to also think about all of the things that can go wrong and why in god’s name would he want to be with a person who has to get a little drunk to express any kind of real emotion anyway, and oh god what if he thinks I am trying to take advantage of him, this is never going to go well why would it ever go well
- Alone, when you are sitting at home listening to records, and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” comes on and you think of him, and you wonder what he is doing right now, and if when he hears this song, he also thinks of you
- Out on the town, when you’ve decided you’re done nursing an impossible crush and it is time to get back out there
- In a cocktail, while sharing a drink with a man you met through online dating or a friend, and after about an hour’s conversation, you start to reminisce about that first hour of knowing the person you really love, when all you did was tease each other, and you are kind of sure that you will never experience that kind of electricity and newness ever again
- From a hip flask, at a wedding for a mutual friend when he sneaks away from his girlfriend to smoke a cigarette in the alley even though he has promised her he’d quit smoking, and he looks really handsome and sly as he produces a small bottle of whisky from the inside of his suit jacket and tells you he is planning to just give her the keys to his car so he can have fun with the gang for once
- To make you good at dancing, when you go to a show with all of your friends and he walks in, gives you that big smile and whips you onto the dance floor without so much as a “hello”
- Under the stars, when you both agree to sleep on the back porch of a friend’s place after a very raucous weekend party because it is much cooler than it is in the house
- In a Manhattan, when you and your friend separately and unknowingly order the exact same cocktail the exact same specific way, and when the waitress brings them over to the table you both raise your hand and look at each other and laugh, as your respective dates both feel a little more left out, like they have all evening when you two keep talking excitedly, agreeing and disagreeing with the same amount of joy and fervor, until finally, your dates mutually agree that it is time for the evening to end by whispering into your ear “this place sucks and I have to get up really early.”
- To steel your heart and numb your brain when you kind of know that he is about to let you down easy and then he tells you, when the two of you are alone, that he has decided to marry his girlfriend, because he’s almost thirty and it’s time to grow up, you know? Because he’s almost thirty and he doesn’t know what else to do
- Standing up in the back room of your favorite bar amongst your other friends, having had a few already, and saying “fuck him. His loss” and cheers’ing everyone in the room, despite the fact that they have no fucking idea what you’re talking about
- To sleep
- To forget
- To make yourself social, when you’re at a gallery party with him and his fiancée and some other people, and you end up in a side room where only the residents and gallery artists are allowed to hang out, and when you say hello to him and ask him how he is, he says “what? No!” and you look at him puzzled and he asks “what did you say?” and you ask him again how he is and he says “oh, I thought you were asking me if I broke up with Heather yet” and when she comes into the room and sees the two of you talking, everyone in the room is silent for an uncomfortably long time until he gets up to welcome her.
- To excess, on his birthday, when you guys tear up the town while his girlfriend is home because she has to work early, and he tells you how unhappy he is sometimes and you think for a second about telling him off, but decide instead to leave the party without telling anyone because the whole thing is just, well, it’s a fucking bummer
- Secretly, when you arrive at a party with a mutual friend who’s there to hit on a college sophomore, and you both feel old because you are not college sophomores, so you make a flimsy excuse to step outside for a moment, and you both sneak out around the corner to a dive bar that plays a bunch of 90s songs you always imagined him hating. You talk until the bar closes then head back to the party, where the two of you tell your mutual friend you had a great time meeting his girlfriend but you’re both gonna duck out now, and the friend gives you a weird look but doesn’t question it, nobody questions it, nobody wants to know the answers
- From a bottle, when you guys walk back to his place at 4 in the morning and take the long way home and it feels elegant, majestic, right
- Defiantly, when it is nearly dawn and the two of you are still awake, blasting French jazz tunes and lying on the hardwood floor of his living room, and goddamn it, you both should have been asleep hours ago, it is so late, and somehow the conversation turns as it always does to the wild days of your early friendship, when you stayed up until dawn this way every weekend, talking and talking and talking, and how you can’t remember anything important about your life before then but you can remember every little detail about so many of the nights since then, and he looks at you sort of distrustfully, and asks you why it has always been that whenever you look at him, he feels like he’s the only person in the universe, and you shrug and say “maybe you are” and you both fall silent, realizing the bottle has gone empty
- To remember
- To feel, to allow yourself openly to feel, even if it’s just for one disappointing moment when you have to admit to yourself that this isn’t going to go your way, that you can’t force other people to love you the way that you want them to love you and that makes you fucking sad.
- With conviction, when it is time to pick yourself up off the floor of your own heart
- In a toast to the dawn, after sneaking out of his apartment, when you head down to the beach with what little is left in a hip flask you stole from the party earlier, and you sit down amongst the rocks, holding onto the glow of the last few hours, that tiny little glimmer of hope that you’ve nursed like a child for so long, holding onto it, holding onto it, and then, finally, as you empty out the rest of the hip flask into the waves splashing up all around you, finally letting it go.
