I Love You

This is a love story. It's kinda similar to The Notebook, only involving booze and heaving.

This all happened at a friend's camping party, months after I had a bug in my teeth. It took place in a backyard where everyone could get hammered, constantly fall in the ground's natural potholes and go pee in the woods. We had Christmas lights decorating the laundry line and patio, a bunch of tents and a boombox playing dance music. It was obviously a black-tie kind of affair.


Aww. We look so normal.

Andrew and I had been dating (which for us, was mostly composed of four wheeling and making out) for a while, but we were still in the phase where I wanted to impress him. And so how did I attempt to astound him? By downing half of a quart of "French Kiss", a vanilla liqueur, in thirty minutes. (Yes, I now know that being drunk is not actually impressive.) I thought it wasn't a big deal, since I had done it before. It was only later that I remembered that the first time I drank half a bottle of Kiss, it took the entire night to do so, rather than half an hour.

Result? Me, in my tent, laying in the fetal position, as the Earth spun a lot faster than it usually did. I had never felt so nauseous, dizzy and disgusting. I hadn't told anyone I was in the tent, but after a while, Andrew came looking for me. He entered the tent with a goofy smile on his face, probably thinking he was going to get some action or something. He was so wrong.

Andrew ended up holding me and rubbing my back for hours as I cried like a little baby. He tried to tell me stories to take my mind off of my misery, but trying to ignore the feeling that your insides are playing Twister can be difficult.

And then he said it, those three magical words.

"I love you".

Even in my haze of torture, I thought to myself "He has to be joking. I am the most revolting mess right now.". What I said outloud was "Now is not the time, Andrew." But after convincing me he was completely serious, I said it back. I then lunged my upper body out of the tent to heave on the grass.

I do want to state that though there was heaving, there was no actual vomiting. And for that, I am proud.

Fact: I have never actually vomited due to drinking. I like to add that to my list of accomplishments. I may have gotten so drunk that I hid under a table during a party, eating popcorn with nacho cheese (which is amazing), I may have also been so inebriated that I thought I was so ghetto that I challenged my Black friend to a dance-off (which I thought I won, but later came to realize that there was no dance-off, since I was just dancing by myself), but never have I puked. Take that, sorority girls!

The next morning, I felt bad, but it was nothing that a Tim Horton's Breakfast Sandwich couldn't cure (seriosuly, a Tim's Breakfast Sandwich is THE best cure for a hangover.) When asked why the hell he had picked that time to declare his love, he responded with "When I realized that I was willing to hold your hair back if you puked, I realized that I love you."

While not conventionally romantic, that sentence fits him and our relationship to the T, and I love it.