I’d noticed this for the first time just recently, after I’d started drinking more heavily. Each time I looked out on that scenery with drunken eyes I’d be overwhelmed by the unbelievable purity of those colors, and I’d start feeling as if nothing really mattered, like I wouldn’t really care at all even if I were to lose everything I had.
This wasn’t resignation, or desperation. It was a much more natural form of acceptance, a feeling that arose from a sweep of emotion that was quiet and cool and crystal-clear.
Every night I fell asleep thinking about these things.
Of course I realized that I was drinking too much and that it would be a good idea for me to start drinking less, and during the daytime I always swore that I’d drink only the tiniest amount that night. But then night would come and the first glass of beer would lead to the next and soon I’d be flying along. I’d start thinking about how well I’d sleep if I just drank a little bit more, and I’d find myself fixing yet another gin and tonic. As the night deepened I’d start increasing the amount of gin, and the drinks would get stronger. And as I munched my way through a bag of the greatest snack this century has produced–Butter Soy Sauce Popcorn–I’d think, Damn, I’ve done it again. . . . Here I am drinking. I never drank enough to make me feel that I’d done something wrong, but I sometimes got a bit of a shock when I discovered that there was an empty bottle standing on the table in front of me.
. . . .The reverberations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I’d met in all kinds of places, people I’d become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in the scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace . . . the voice was like a combination of all this.. . . .Inside she was probably just a strange, high-strung, unpleasant woman. But there was something truly special in her appearance. The soft shadow you saw in her panties, slender shoulders flickering in and out of the blackness of her long hair, odd little valleys over her collarbone, the curves under her breasts that seemed so impossibly, untouchably distant . . . she could have be the embodiment of the diaphanous image of Woman herself, come shakily to life, stumbling around. That’s certainly what you felt.
