First Drink = First Drunk  − April, 1997

The mood swings were hard to deal with. I would be so happy one moment. And then a wave of sadness would break over me that was so unexpected and so incredible that it made it hard to breathe. I was dating Ryan Disano when Mark died. Ryan was good to me. I remember him at the wake, wearing his brother’s suit that was too big for him. I remember his nervous movements. He didn’t know how to comfort me. But it was sweet. He was sweet. One night, a few weeks after Mark died, I got drunk with him. His mother was out of town and he had some friends over. They had brought alcohol. I was sixteen. I had never tasted alcohol in my life. I remember that Ryan wasn’t too keen on the idea, but I was pretty adamant that I could handle it. I had no concept of how much I could drink. So I just drank. I drank one after another and it felt good. It felt good to feel nothing. I remember having to go to the bathroom at one point, and being alone in there, just thinking how marvelous it was to be spinning. To be feeling such a big, wide nothingness. I remember Ryan’s worried knocking at the bathroom door, asking if I was alright. And then I remember nothing. But I know that Lucas came to pick me up that night and that he carried me to bed downstairs, where I vomited all over my bedroom floor. My father was furious with me; my mother was an emotional wreck. I can imagine now what it must have been like for her to have found me sick in my bedroom so shortly after Mark had died. I realize now that her first thought must have been that it was happening again. My father went to Ryan’s house looking for him. I was horrified. I broke up with Ryan shortly after. I was embarrassed by and angry with my father. I directed a lot of my anger at him for a long time. And I had a lot of anger then. I hated him with a passion that was hot and raw. In return, he directed a lot of his anger back at me. I’m not going to pretend that there weren’t times that I didn’t deserve to be yelled at, or punished. The drinking was one time. When I started cutting school and disappearing on them for hours – that was another. But I always felt it wasn’t justified. I resented his anger. I think, maybe, that I wanted him to see that I was just incredibly sad, and not simply a troublemaker. But, to be fair, I didn’t see that he was simply sad as well. Everything hurt.

A couple of weeks later, I got caught cutting school. I can imagine, now, how satisfying it must have been for my father that day, after we had been clashing so much over the previous weeks. He sat me down at the table, his mouth a hard line of anger. Why did you leave? I couldn’t even answer him – all of my answers withered inside of me. I didn’t know how to explain that I just wanted to avoid the world, that I was sad, that I was angry. I began to cry. I can imagine, now, how satisfying it must have been for him to slap me. What a release for all of his fury. I know that he was angry with me, with himself, with the world for being cruel. Anger began to turn to bitterness inside of me.

Time went on. Things just kept rolling forward and building up and I was too tired and too hurt and too angry to bother trying to keep up. Things went downhill with school. My own anger startled me. I was always yelling. I burned with frustration. I wanted to tear out my own hair and scratch at my own skin and break every window in the house. Even more than that, I wanted to hurt people. Every time I saw someone running or laughing or relaxed, I wanted to smash their stupid, smiling faces into walls. I was angry at my father for never crying, and I was angry at my mother for always crying.