Drink – Danielle Chelosky

September 28, 2025

Mia loved to drink. She did not want to stop. Not when she got kicked out of the bar for puking on the floor. Not when she fell and broke her foot. Not when she fucked someone she said she would never fuck. Not when she started tugging at the door handles of random cars parked outside. Not when she dropped and shattered her phone. Not when she spilled liquor on her laptop and had to pay $1,000 for a new one. Not when she drove herself home and remembered none of it the following morning. Not when she sobbed on the side of a street while lost in a foreign country. Not when she fell and chipped her tooth. Not when she wandered unfamiliar streets until sunrise with a dead phone unable to get a ride home. Not when she got dumped for drinking too much.

Then Mia was on a first date and lost consciousness. She floated through the cosmos in this sweet stranger’s bed. When she came to, she was excited by the adventure. The next morning she realized she’d had a seizure. She stowed the thought away into a compartment of her mind she was hoping to lose the key to. She asked the boy, Cody, to touch her, and he slid his fingers between her legs until she was begging to be fucked. He fucked her gently then roughly. She shrieked into the pillow. He stayed inside of her for a few minutes after he came and she played with his hair. After their bodies detached she asked if he was going to ghost her. He said no, but he would prefer she didn’t drink as much as she did last night. She quietly cried. Her favorite dates were with alcoholics. She only ever fell in love with them. Being around alcoholics was inhabiting a separate reality, a reality where she was good and everything was right. She didn’t like to be reprimanded or misunderstood. Cody was an alcoholic, but he’d been clean for five years. He was ten years older than her. He kept his word and didn’t ghost her.

Cody bartended while getting his PhD in sociology. Mia, unable to repress the epileptic episode, sat at his bar and watched him make drinks for hours while she sipped seltzer water. She paid to control the jukebox and forced her music upon the drunks. She could see the way Cody disappeared from his body as he rushed back and forth taking orders and pouring liquids into pungent concoctions. A whiff of whiskey always caused Mia to shudder but it did nothing to Cody. She was fascinated by his indifference, his automatic nature.

When his shift was over, Cody would bring Mia back to his apartment and fuck her. He was staying in a sublet and his room—which she barely processed her first night there—was full of paraphernalia that Cody didn’t understand. The walls were covered in posters for movies he hadn’t seen; books he’d never heard of were stacked on every surface. After sex, he would ask her about her newfound sobriety. She would tell him her feelings. She was his subject of examination, his project. He told her about how his period of self-medication with alcohol had lasted fourteen years; hers had been half that and felt like a lifetime. She joked that he was her sponsor. He didn’t like this joke, but he chuckled and kissed her forehead anyway.

The best part of Mia’s sobriety was the sense of moral superiority it gave her. At the bar, she watched those around her descend into embarrassing intoxication, and she thought to herself about how she was once one of them, but she’d matured. She didn’t need alcohol to be an idiot; she could be perfectly healthy and of right mind and still an idiot. Like when Cody’s beautiful friend Claire showed up to the bar and introduced herself to Mia and Mia, seething with unreasonable jealousy, told Claire to fuck off, she didn’t mean to say it but it just came out and then she tried to apologize by buying Claire a drink and then accidentally spilled it all over Claire. Mia was so humiliated by the entire incident that she felt liberated.

But Mia couldn’t see herself being clean for five years like Cody was. She kept telling herself, Next weekend I’ll have one or two drinks, then pushed it off to the next weekend. She enjoyed her new routine but knew routines get old. Cody recommended ways to keep things interesting. He did things like try matcha and go to the movies and play board games with friends once a week. Mia did not want to do any of these things. Generally, she liked hanging out in bars, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and fucking. But cigarettes were beginning to bother her throat and coffee was starting to mess with her stomach. It was like she couldn’t have anything. Her body rejected everything she loved, or maybe everything she loved happened to be bad for her body. One day she took a sip of Cody’s matcha and spit it out onto his bare chest. It tasted like grass.

Mia didn’t want to give up cigarettes or coffee. She didn’t want to play Scrabble and if she did she’d probably end up flipping the board. She accompanied Cody to a movie one night and left halfway through because she was bored. He didn’t follow her out. She walked to a bar and got one drink and then another and then another. She felt the warmth of her past routine. It’d only been a month, but a month in sober-time was basically a year. The days had stretched on longer without alcohol. As she imbibed the gin and tonic she felt time disintegrate altogether. Her phone buzzed with calls from Cody. She imagined his small frame searching the city for her, his big arms—she loved his big arms—swinging doors open and his eyes darting around. She wondered if it wasn’t him that she loved, but the feeling of being taken care of, the risk of letting him down. She used to panic at the idea of disappointing someone; now it was a source of immense relief.

The gin and tonics were not doing their job. She suspected the bartender was sabotaging her. She wanted to do something drastic like start a fight with her but she wasn’t drunk enough to be that uninhibited. She drank more and more and retained a harsh sense of awareness. It was her worst nightmare. Finally, she answered a call from Cody. She told him where she was. Instead of saying he was on his way, he said he was going to sleep. He hung up. She felt betrayed. Like she wasn’t worth rescuing. Dissatisfied, she paid and left and walked for a long time. She didn’t vomit. She didn’t fuck anyone regrettable. She didn’t fall and break her foot or chip her tooth. She didn’t sob or get lost. She didn’t drop her phone. She didn’t lose consciousness. She didn’t get dumped. She just had some trouble sleeping.