red string of fate.
11. Our muses are destined to be night out friends; they’ll never talk outside of being intoxicated and playful, but once the party as started the mood is high, they’re temporary best friends.
There’s always an excuse to drinking, one must not deny. It has an inevitable force that draws one to it, an allure that is difficult to resist. One might be the bitter taste it renders to the crevices of your mouth, two is the warmth that captivates the tubes as you swallow it down, three is the mix of two and cold in one, four is the inexplicable courage it brings and peculiar sense of being drunk – perhaps the last being the most evident reasons of all. But being drunk itself is a mere excuse for people to loose themselves off, to free the inner nature they have within. It shreds people off their everyday masks, because being drunk, alcohol is to be blamed for their actions, for every unfiltered word they speak, for every thought that comes into their minds. And it frees them of being judged. And by this who wouldn’t want to be drunk?
It is a repetitive episode that links them – a man and a woman distanced by one foot, both having series of cocktails and shot glasses laid in front of them. The male chugs a drink in one go, swallowing the liquid swiftly as if it is water, and then his eyes hovers back to the front where the neon lights behind the counter top did not appeal to his blank stare. And there was the female, legs crossed, her one hand brushing the strays of hair from her face while tapping one finger on the tiled counter before taking a small cocktail glass and devours the coloured liquid with such calculated elegance. Drowned in contemplation, she dismisses the blasting music that attacks her ears, closing herself again in her own small circle of joy within the bar whilst acknowledging no one but two persons in her proximity – the bar tender and the familiar patron. This start had always been the same – it only differs on who between them takes the first seat, but both knew, in their own, how things would happen once the alcohol takes both of them.
A few shots of vodka, glasses of whiskeys and Bacardi, it varies from a good twenty to forty minutes. Each shot they both took slowly delivers them into a state of which only the two of them plus the alcohol could comprehend. Silently they gauge each other, and when finally they knew they were completely intoxicated, one would have the courage to speak. And in this occasion, it was Lorraine who initiated.
“You know…”
The other turned his face; donned with a smile on his lips as though a friend had come out of nowhere. He listens, like he always did, carefully. “Hmmm?”
“If I say I’ve killed a man, what would be your thoughts?
“You’re drunk.”
“You are too.” She retorts simply. The thought came out of nowhere, a slip of her subconscious trying to surface at the most convenient time. “Tell me. I’m curious.”
“You’ve got hands of gold.” His hands slips to pull hers, the back of her palm resting on his, thumb brushing over the soft lines of her skin. “Your palms are cold, but tender, soft. It doesn’t deserve to be tainted with blood. And I don’t think you can.”
She offers him a smile, one so faint with content but delivered with such poignancy.
“I haven’t killed a man.”
Her body calling for another dose, Lorraine took another glass of some liquor she need not know what and chugged it down in one fo, trying to prolong her intoxication that seems to vaporize with the thin air.
“But I killed men. Many of them”
It was up to him to decipher the truth behind it, but he knows that with the aid of alcohol, she never lies. Just as how he can’t with her. - in this temporary instance at the very least.