New Year's Eve

Two years ago, I got drunk for the first time.
— Jalen (@princexhermes) August 19, 2013

He’s seventeen with love in his heart and good vibes on his mind. It’s the biggest night for his family so why does he feel like crying? Maybe it’s cause the love of his life just couldn’t make it, a feeling of loneliness and despair lingers over him and he can’t shake it. So he has to take it … in stride and keep walking with pride. He sits in the car playing Loft Music over and over until the pain that made him want to die has died. The music cuts off and that’s the benediction of his car ride. He steps out the vehicle, hands in his pocket and eyes red as fire but this isn’t a drill. This is real. He needs a drink cause marijuana is for low-lives and thieves. It’s New Year’s Eve.

So he takes one.
Scratch that, he takes a few.
The adults are too buzzed and drunk on happiness.
No one notices this.

This, the lifeless love-struck kid of seventeen years.
He’s never taken a drink in his life.
Yet he’s sitting here getting sloppy drunk,
Cause he misses his wife.

He misses her warm lips and her soft touch.
Her brilliant smile and her comforting hugs.
According to Jose Cuervo and his white friend,
Pain exits quicker if the drinking begins.

So he drinks and he drinks and he drinks until his head is a UFO.
He spins in his cousin’s attic room where none of the adults know.
They are oblivious to the transformation, to the steps he’s taken.
They were mistaken. They thought he was better than that.

He wasn’t though.

So he continued to drink, smuggling more to the attic lair.
His cousins and kindred are like him in spirit
But they do not drink from his fountain of youth.
They’d rather face the truth.

The sad truth he had tried to deny.
The real reason why he wanted to die.
The truth that he concealed with a beautiful lie,
His father is a horrible guy.

He made him come to the party because it’s the tradition.
He didn’t know what his son was missing.
He thought she was just another high school girl.
He didn’t know she was his world.

He didn’t really care either.

So the prodigal son continued to partake until it drudged up memories he wanted to forget. Things like the progress report he was given a busted lip for. The supposed backtalk that warranted a damaged esophagus. The Halloween drunkard who left a knuckle shaped mark in his chest. The monster of his life, his father, his idol and his test.

So he started to scream. He remembers screaming so loud because the pain had reached a fever pitch. Drunk on Jose Cuervo and pain, his sanity was gone. The one thing keeping him from realizing this:

“HE NEVER GAVE A FUCK ABOUT ME.”

The scream that echoes in his memory.

If that night were a glass vase, it’s now shattered into a million pieces.
He can’t remember it, he doesn’t want to.
He knows he fought his father and his uncle, drunkenly, valiantly.
Then he passed out, he cried himself to sleep in awe of it all, quietly.