My 21st birthday I was in London, my mom was sick, and I was so fucking lonely.
Four days before my 21st birthday I moved to London to study abroad for the semester. My mom was not yet in remission from the breast cancer she had been diagnosed with the summer before. My dad was sober and had been for months. This fragile and unusual balance between my parents — in which my mom was not ok and my dad was — had never happened before and did not happen again. It was perhaps these unique circumstances that gave me the courage to move across the ocean at a time when I probably should have stayed home. But it felt like my one shot to be completely on my own, to have the experience of living abroad subsidized by student loans and an aura of acceptance of a truly expensive and frivolous act. It was selfish; I knew it, I took it, and I didn’t look back.
Me in my £40 discount Harrod’s coat, London, 2007
I arrived at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) on January 4, 2007 after being bumped to a business class seat from O’Hare to Heathrow. I sat next to an incredibly charming British guy who was on his way back from Aspen with his family (and his girlfriend, ugh). He encouraged me to buy a carton of cigarettes duty free on the plane if I smoked, because they were dirt cheap compared to what they would be like in London. I bought a carton of Marlboro Lights (my dad’s preferred cigarette when he could still afford them and not the Pall Malls he smoked later in life when he couldn’t) and they lasted me basically the entire semester. I remember too that they were serving champagne and I hesitated to take one because my 21st birthday was still three days away.
At Heathrow, a man named Harry Gibbing met me and the rest of the study abroad cohort arriving that day (that entire semester, any time he emailed us, the subject read, “HARRY CALLING,” followed by the point of the email. I loved those emails). The QMUL semester did not start until the 10th of January, so the 40 or so of us American students were the first students back on campus after the holidays. We were hosted a series of introductory mixers with strange booze combinations and locations (hot mulled wine in a classroom? Hard cider on a river boat?) but we were all giddy to be drinking in social settings in the open.
Learning to love Strongbow, somewhere on the river Thames, London 2007.
We came from all over the U.S., many of us from the “almost Ivy” type colleges like Michigan, USC, Lehigh, Tufts, Wisconsin, Bates College. I fell in with a group of girls who were not the cool girls, girls who were a bit more anxious, a bit less worldly than the cool girls. One was from Minnesota, a year younger than the rest of us, who confessed to not having enough money to feed herself for the full semester. One was from a tiny school in Illinois, who immediately found a weed guy and started making dinner for us regularly. One was from California and had never seen snow; when it got really cold she wouldn’t leave her flat for days at a time. These three girls were my main friends, though we had basically nothing in common and we didn’t really enjoy “going out” in the same ways, which at that stage of our lives in that setting was kind of the most important thing. I think the glue that held us together was fear, that if we weren’t friends with each other, we wouldn’t have friends at all.
Once we established ourselves as a group of friends during orientation, they attempted to throw me a birthday dinner and party, for which I remain grateful. We went out for a traditional style pub dinner; I ordered fish and chips and a glass of white wine. They insisted on ordering me a shot, something called an Orgasm that I recall nothing about, except that both the server and I were embarrassed by it.
I’m sure we gave her a bad tip, too, London, 2007.
One would imagine we would have gone out to a bar or a club after dinner, but I don’t think we did. Maybe we weren’t sure how or where we would go. I think instead we returned to our block of flats to hang out and drink in someone’s kitchen.
It felt like an extremely normal college party, everyone standing around the kitchen, shouting, drinking out of plastic cups; the only difference was the jet lag and the unfamiliar drinks. Did they sing happy birthday to me? I don’t remember. I remember I kept drinking and drinking, hoping to get to a level of lubrication that would dull the numb ache inside, but I couldn’t shake it. I was grateful to this group of strangers for their kindness in using my birthday as an excuse for a party. I’m sure the evening would have been exactly the same for everyone else either way, but it still felt a little special to me, even if I knew I was forcing myself to feel that way a little bit. I was not alone, but I felt incredibly lonely; this was not their fault.
Me trying to convince myself I was having fun (and wearing a cool outfit), my 21st birthday, 7 January 2007, London
Around 3am I stumbled across the cobblestone drive to my own flat. I looked at myself in my tiny bathroom mirror (the only time in my life I’ve had my own bathroom) and I sobbed. I sobbed because I was scared, I sobbed because I was lonely, I sobbed because 4 months prior my mom’s right breast has been removed and reconstructed with muscle and tissue from her belly and I had left her. I sobbed because her birthday is the day before mine, and it was the first time we weren’t together in some way. I sobbed because I hadn’t figured out how to get my Internet to work, so I couldn’t even call her yet on Skype and cry on camera to her. I sobbed because I was drunk.
My 21st birthday was not the first time I had been drunk. I had been drinking socially since I was about 16, though I drank less than my friends did in high school; I was terrified of getting trouble (which happened anyway!!!) but I was also terrified of losing control of my own body; it’s why I never smoked much weed or why I was still a virgin on that 21st birthday. I felt a constant frightened need to protect my own body, even though it was a body I didn’t always understand and often hated. Losing that control in the form of being drunk didn’t become appealing until I was in college, away from the gossipy eyes of other people’s parents, my own mother, and a local college town police force that found it necessary to intimidate and punish drunk high school kids. Once I got to college and lived in a more progressive town, on my own, I drank the way everyone else seemed to drink: excessively, constantly, and cheerfully.
But like all of us who drank excessively in college and beyond, I have a complicated and confusing relationship with alcohol. This is exacerbated by my family history of alcoholism and addiction. I can say with certainty that the best and worst days of my life have included the consumption of booze, including my 21st birthday. I can imagine a future where this stops being the case, that eventually I will grow tired, bored, or afraid enough of alcohol to stop drinking altogether, but that future isn’t quite here yet.
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