At the beginning, it had reasons.
It was a weekend, so we drank. There was a game, so we drank. Somebody was coming over, so we drank. The reasons weren’t even really excuses, they were just the language you used to name what everyone was already doing. Alcohol wasn’t the event, it was the accessory. A tone setter. Something to hold. Something to do with your hands while you talked.
And there were always people around then.
That mattered to me more than I would have admitted at the time. Drinking alone still had a stigma in my head, even before I had any framework for why. Like there was some invisible rulebook that said: if you’re drinking with people, it’s normal. If you’re drinking alone, it’s a sign. So as long as there were other bodies in the room, I could tell myself I was fine.
If no one wanted to drink, I could usually convince them.
I didn’t think of that as coercion. I thought of it as enthusiasm. Selling the vibe. Making the night fun. But it meant the presence of “other people” wasn’t always a neutral fact. Sometimes it was something I engineered, because it kept the story intact: I’m not drinking alone, so I don’t have a problem.
I wouldn’t have used the word problem then. I’m just telling you the shape of the logic.
The drinking itself started to develop a shape too.
Not the kind of ritual you see in movies, where someone pours slowly and stares into the glass like they’re haunted. This was simpler. Quieter. More practical. It was a kitchen routine that got practiced enough times that it stopped feeling like a choice.
By then I could do it without looking, like a dance I didn’t remember learning.
The freezer would open and the cold air would push out into the room for a second. Bottles lined up inside, waiting. I’d reach in, grab what we needed, and pivot on my heel toward the cabinet like my body already knew the route. Shot glasses clinked as they came down, that thin little sound that always felt sharper than it should have. Set them on the counter. Pour. Caps back on. Chaser ready. Everything arranged in a way that made the next step inevitable.
It was manual transmission.
Hands and feet doing their thing, brain barely involved. Once you’ve driven a stick enough times, you stop thinking about shifting. You feel the moment for it and you move. You don’t narrate it. You don’t decide it. You just do it.
That’s what the sequence became.
And the weird part, the part that took me a long time to understand because it didn’t feel dramatic, was that the comfort started before the alcohol did.
The relief wasn’t only the first burn down the throat. It was the predictability. The sense that the night was being handled. That we were moving into a mode where the edges would soften, conversation would get easier, the internal friction would drop. Even if nobody said anything profound, even if nothing “happened,” the act of setting it up made the evening feel like it had a track to run on.
We’d line up the glasses.
That image is burned in my head more than any particular story from those nights. A row of little circles on a counter, clear and expectant, like punctuation. Like a sentence about to start. The glasses didn’t just hold vodka. They held the promise that the next hour would be easier to live inside.
We’d take them, reset, pour again when it made sense. Sometimes it was three at a time, sometimes it was whatever the rhythm wanted, but the number wasn’t the point. The point was that it had become a rhythm.
And as long as there were other people laughing in the background, as long as it was a weekend or a game or a reason that sounded normal, I didn’t have to look too hard at what the rhythm was doing.
I just watched the line of glasses and felt the night click into gear.