Good Times With Alcohol

With the statue nowhere in sight, Lucille and Regina ended up going to the city’s Public Park. Tucked away in a residential area in the southeastern part of the city, the park featured several terraces connected by a winding set of stairs that offered a view of the ocean. Starting at ground level, the duo made it up a single terrace before a panting Regina tapped out. Lucille didn’t particularly feel the need to reach the top, so they ended up finding an empty spot of green to relax upon.

After spending all day on asphalt, the sudden softness of grass below her feet relaxed Lucille. No chance of used needles or trash here, either - she sat down and immediately sighed in relief. After an hour of aimless walking, it felt good to finally just chill out again. And this was a park in a wealthy area, which meant that the homeless were kept away from it.

Lucille rubbed her eyes. She had gone through too many emotions that day to have another mental monologue about the ethics of homelessness. She just wanted to sit on the green grass and see the city bay. The bridge from earlier stretched across it; Lucille could spot the evening train rumbling down the tracks in the distance. A few motorboats passed beneath the bridge, appearing as small as insects below the great structure.

The view was nice. But it didn’t necessarily make Lucille happy. The huge hole in heart remained, and she hugged her knees.

“You ever get afraid?” Lucille finally asked.

“...of?” Regina said, not understanding. She had laid down next to Lucille, her hands behind her head, her eyes closed.

“Life.” Lucille sighed as another boat passed below the bridge. “Ever since I graduated school, I feel like something’s missing. I’m supposed to be living as a full-fledged adult now. Really living. But to live, you need a purpose. Or a reason. Otherwise…you’re just drifting aimlessly, and that’s not living at all.”

Regina amused herself by dropping a fallen leaf over her mouth, then blowing on it to keep it afloat. It finally drifted off to the side of her face, landing on the ground. “Says who?”

“What do you mean? That’s what life is. I want to look back on life and say I’ve done something with it. I want to live it to the fullest. I don’t want to work for somebody. I want to be my own boss. I thought by going to school for writing, I could do that…but I haven’t exactly found a writing job yet. And I’m nowhere near good enough to publish books on my own. And even then…”

She hugged her knees even tighter. “Writing doesn’t fill the hole in my heart. It’s fun, it makes me happy in the moment, but I wouldn’t say it makes me happy as a person. Even as a hobby, it doesn’t quite do it. And then all the loans and the wars make that hole even bigger.” Lucille glanced at her relaxed companion, who kept the usual nonchalant look on her face. “Don’t you have a hole in your heart? Don’t you feel like something’s missing?”

A gust of wind blew the leaf away. Regina scrunched her face in thought. “Well, to be honest, not particularly.”

“Then what’s your reason for living?”

“Uh…can’t say I’ve ever really thought about it.”

“And that’s the thing,” Lucille said, throwing her hands in the air. “Not knowing the answer scares the hell out of me. We’re both wasting our lives. Doesn’t it scare the hell out of you?”

“No…and I don’t get it. I’m not wasting a thing.”

“Can you name a single thing you’ve done in the past four years?” Lucille asked. “You have a job, at least, but I don’t know if I’d call stocking shelves at the grocery store a career. But in your free time, did you write a book or go hiking or travel somewhere new or make a new friend?”

Regina raised an eyebrow. “...no.”

“Did you learn a new skill or language?”

Regina neatly folded her hands across her lap. “...no.”

“Do you have a man or woman in your life?”

“...n-no.”

“Do you even have the tiniest of plans for what you want to do tomorrow? The next week? The next month? The next year?”

“...no.”

“Do you have any conceivable reason to get up in the morning?”

Regina rubbed her head. It took a long while for her to answer. “I like to burn and watch television.”

Lucille reached her point. “So, outside of your minimum wage job, you have absolutely no plans, no ideas, and nothing going on in your life outside of smoking weed and watching television?”

“...yes?”

“I’m not trying to single you out,” Lucille quickly added when she saw the confused look on her friend’s face. “The only thing I’ve done the past four years is get a degree that won’t get a job and learn an esoteric amount of useless information about Japan. I have no conceivable reason to get up in the morning, either. That’s why I have this stupid feeling that something’s missing in my life. It always gnaws at me. But you’re saying this doesn’t bother you?”

The sun set behind the city, turning the whole sky a bright orange that stretched all the way into the horizon, meeting the dark sea. Clouds rolled along, huge white fleets, sailing away towards the ocean. Regina placed her hands behind her head again and finally spoke.

“What bothers me is that nothing does.”

…

There’s only one solution to an existential crisis - getting outrageously drunk. Japan had a pretty big drinking culture and Lucille was 22, only three years younger than the slice of life staple known as the hard-drinking Christmas cake teacher, so Good Times With Alcohol is how she justified tonight’s binge to herself. Those teachers complained about not being married at age 25; something like that made Lucille’s head spin, since Lucille was still at a level where she needed to rehearse what she would say before going through the drive-thru of a fast food place.

And speaking of making her head spin, Lucille got a tall bottle of Sapporo beer to fulfill the LARP, and then all of a sudden she passed the bartender back five empty bottles. Oh, that’s right, they were at a bar, not quite a dive bar but a drinking hole that uses a sense of being rundown as its aesthetic. The sun had set on this Saturday night, meaning the building was already packed with young adults Lucille’s age. Or were they adults now? Lucille couldn’t answer, or rather knew the answer but refused to admit it, so she added a sixth and seventh to her stomach. Somebody passed out funky glasses that said “Party Like It's 2000” on them, with two of the zeros forming the actual part she could see through; Lucille wore them proudly.

The bartender slid over two gin and tonics. Lucille offered one to Regina, but her friend shook her head.

“Not really a drinker,” Regina said, her usual impassive face now lit up by strobing multi-colored lights. “And besides, I gotta drive.”

“But you drive high all the time,” Lucille pointed out, except her words were far more slurred than a simple dialogue tag would suggest.

Regina frowned. “There’s a difference.”

There probably wasn’t actually a difference, but eleven and twelve went down just as easily as one and two. Thirteen brought Lucille out onto the dance; live music played, but it was the oddest thing - they sang in English when it should’ve been in Japanese. They were in Tokyo, weren’t they?

Standing in the middle of the dancing crowd, Lucille laughed along. She wasn’t in Tokyo - she was right here. Wherever that was, who knew? How old was she? What was that thing about her heart or something? It all drifted away because her head felt like the equivalent of a slow, dumb laugh and everything seemed so blurry.

Regina was blurry, which was odd because she should’ve been dancing. But Regina wasn’t one for dancing, either, so she just kind of stood there, no alcohol in her, as Lucille moved along in rhythm to the beat. Lucille tried to get her to move by increasing the aggressiveness of her own dancing, but upon seeing her friend’s face, enough cognitive force broke through Lucille’s mind to finally give her a coherent thought beyond “alcohol fun, Tokyo fun, I want to drive!”

Bars aren’t Regina’s scene. We’ve been here for like two hours or twenty hours or something. It might even be 1 AM. It might even be morning. That’s a problem because Regina likes to go to bed early because she doesn't like to move. I should help her with that.

“After I go pee, want to get out of here?” Lucille asked.

Regina shook her head. “Don’t let me ruin your fun.”

Lucille took a big swig to finish drink fifteen. “I’ve had plenty of fun. Give me your car keys, let's go home.”

Reds and blues and greens and purples flashed across Regina’s face as she smirked. “Don’t let me stop you, then.”