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Via the internet (how else), I just dipped so far down into pools of what’s starting to feel disturbingly like my former self and my former life that, when I came up for air, it almost seemed weird that I had a child sleeping in the next room. Like: Wait. What am I now, what is this life I’m living?
Thing is, I wasn’t really dipping into anything I could call mine. It was all about people I’ve known, mostly, and the excellent things they’re doing or have done. I know this is all very annoyingly vague but I’ve just got to keep it that way. Besides, I’m typing in the dark. I’ve been (and continue to be) lucky enough to know some insanely talented and with-it and successful and driven people in my short life so far. And I feel very thankful for that, but I also let it mess with my head sometimes. Or my head messes with the (good) facts and turns them bad, and in creeps this stinky despair. . . Anyway, so, I clicked around in the dark and started to get bogged when I maybe should’ve been getting inspired, damn it, and then I paused to reflect on the baby in the other room.
I had to go in there and turn on the light and run my hand over her head (this doesn’t wake her up, but usually makes her squirm a tiny bit and elicit this amazing little baby sigh) and pull myself back into the here and now. Two truths:
—One of the best things about having a baby is how it can make all the stuff you were so caught up in before seem not so very big a deal.
—One of the worst things about having a baby is how it can make all the stuff you were so caught up in before seem not so very big a deal.
Re the second truth above, I’m getting to the stage (if I haven’t sort of been there all along) where I try to reconcile the pre-baby self with the you-are-mama-now self, see if they can co-exist. Or if I’ll end up with a life that’s the metaphorical equivalent of Mom Jeans (even if I never, ever wear them, because seriously, I will not; I’m not even worried about this). And I guess that’s why I’m here, typing in the dark.
But what I want to write about now are two bottles of Bacardi Silver Mojito coolers. I guess they are close relatives to wine coolers, though they contain no wine and nothing wine-like. These Bacardi Silver Mojito coolers are in my fridge, in the way back, and neither I nor husband put them there. They’ve been back there for almost exactly a year—ever since some friends from Chicago came through town on a road trip through the South and spent a super-hot (it was 100+ degrees) weekend with us. Plenty of drinking that weekend—nothing shamefully excessive, just the usual. (The usual being, um, drinking of the caliber that I haven’t done in almost as long as the coolers have been there. I got pregnant a few weeks after these friends came to town.) The four of us drank beer and wine and some sangria at Rojo, I think. And the last night, post-Rojo, we hit the Western and brought some drinks back here to the apartment, and one of our friends, the girl-half of the couple, brought a six of these Mojito things.
Which was funny. Because before we moved from Chicago, we’d had two bottles of some other flavor of Bacardi cooler in our fridge—placed there by, of course, the same friend. She left them behind when we had a party one time (winter solstice, I believe), and we—Drinkers indeed, but not fans of the alcoholic cooler-type beverage—never drank them. But we let them sit in the fridge. For at least a year. Because, well, honestly, husband and I are too much alike in a few respects, and one of them is that things like having bottles of beverages you’re never EVER going to drink cluttering up your fridge doesn’t bother you too much and so you just let them sit there. . . So there they sat. Until we had to clean out the fridge because we were, like, vacating the apartment. And then? I don’t know. We probably put them in the alley. God bless those Chicago alleys: you can put ANYthing in them and some grateful someone will come along and take it off your hands. (Sigh. I miss the alleys.) I like to think maybe the alcoholic couple who lived across the alley, the ones whose fights kept us duly entertained for two years, enjoyed them.
So you see where I’m going with this. The friend left her leftover Mojito thingys in our fridge here in B’ham, and history repeated itself. Those bevs have been in there almost exactly a year, and I see them all the time and think, “I should throw those out.” But I can’t bring myself to throw out perfectly good (at least by some taste standards) alcohol.
Now. Are you a Bacardi cooler fan? Or even just really, really thirsty and/or jonesing for a light buzz? Then you may come over and relieve us of these items. You know how to contact me.
Solicit aside, I feel like the lingering coolers say something about us (they may say something about our friend, too, but that’s another topic), something not so flattering (but also fairly benign). But right now, paired with all the dipping-into-stuff-online and accompanying sentiment, they’re also doing that Proustian thing where they take me back to the old fridge in the old apartment, and then I’m closing the fridge door, leaving the old coolers be, and looking out the window over the counter where we have just a sliver of a view of the downtown skyline, and maybe there’s a little chill in the air outside, and…ouch. The nostalgia.
On second thought, maybe you can’t have my Bacardi Silver Mojito coolers. Maybe they’ll stay right where they are until we leave this apartment. And then?
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