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In this particular onset flurry of irresponsibility, you take one drink, and then two, thinking of what an excellent story this will make when you go back to tell your sociopathic friend because they have so many stories like this. You think about the experiences that you’re gaining and how cool you might sound later on as you casually tell everyone in the circle that you got vodka-drunk, even though you and everyone around you know that you’re far too intelligent to do something like this to seem cool.  You’re doing this to drown those sorrows that no one thinks you have. It used to be that even you would try to convince yourself that your sorrow meant nothing. You would try to guilt yourself into not crying by saying that you had this perfect life and absolutely nothing to be sad about. But by now you’ve given up trying to convince yourself that your life is amazing because it’s become kind of a joke about how sad and depressed you are, whether your life is perfect or not. Because the truth is, no one cares about how you’re actually feeling. It’s all about the act right now. Those older and wiser than you know that one day people will realize the harm that this act may be causing, but for right now, this act is all you are and all you ever will be.

And you can’t stand it. You sit in a corner of the kitchen, holding a vodka bottle by its neck and desperately trying to pretend that the taste of almost-literal poison flowing down your throat isn’t bothering you, because if you’re not going to seem cool to everyone else (which you know you probably aren’t), you might as well try your damnedest to convince yourself that you’re cool. But you can’t do a too-convincing job of it because you still have that hilarious depressive act to uphold, and if you ever let that slip, even though at the moment it seems perfectly true, you’ll be forgotten.

So you’re sitting, and tears that you didn’t know you had are streaming down your face, because why else would you drink if this weren’t the breaking point? Why else, if not that this is the “dear God, let this end but don’t let me die” moment? At this point, you’re telling yourself that you don’t care how you end up. You’re staring at the block on the counter across from you that holds all the knives, and you know which knife is where in that block, and you’re thinking about which knife will cause the most damage to your skin. You’re thinking about which knife will hurt so much that you start to care. But even this is an act; you care too much. And you know for a fact that if you actually started cutting yourself, it would hurt immediately, and you would realize that what you’re doing is ridiculous and solving nothing. You know that it would be so easy to just let all of this go: to just recognize that things are okay and that vodka is disgusting. But where is the fun in that?

All you want to do is be looked at endearingly. You just want people to laugh at your jokes all the time, no matter how unfunny some of them are. You just want people to understand how truly hard you work to gain their approval, while still making sure that everyone knows that you don’t care what they think. Because that’s what the perfect kid is like. The perfect best friend, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect protagonist: they all desperately want to be liked, but they don’t really care. And you know that you can’t be that, but you try anyway because you must be that in order to survive in this world, but really it’s the opposite. You’re trying so hard, sad friend, and poison is solving all of these problems right now.