A 43-year-old woman was drinking in a bar. She is a frequent customer. She would come in and instantly, the bartender would know what she wants for her first drink. It was always strawberry lemonade vodka as it was her favorite combination of what she loved: strawberry and vodka. The place she frequently attends was a dive bar that has been around for almost twenty years since it was opened when she was twenty-four. She loved the crowd she met daily, the bartenders that were so friendly that she gets free drinks sometimes, and she loved drinking alcohol more than anything.
Today was different. She was given terrible news by her doctor. She had twenty-four hours left to live. She was diagnosed with a disease that was caused by her extreme drinking habits. At that time when she first entered the bar, she just broke up with her boyfriend and her minimum wage job just had to lay her off due to the cutbacks. She was out with friends and they introduced her to alcohol as she was pedant when it comes to trying adult activities. She thought she had nothing to lose. After her first drink, she was aquiline. She would drink daily at the bar and sometimes too much. People around her warned her to take it easy and the men she dated were brief as they see how she handled her liquor and did not like it. She brushed them off and continued her habits. They don’t know her. Flash forward twenty years later, she was facing death, a wake-up call that was too late.
“Hey, you are acting odd today. What’s wrong? Want your usual?”, a bartender came to her table and handed her usual on her table and she just stared at it for several seconds. The bartender then tried to take the drink away, but she snapped, “Wait, leave it!” The bartender looked at her strangely but said nothing and attended to other customers. A memory played in her mind. Her doctor told her there was an experimental medicine that can cure her disease and she can live. The catch? She could never drink again because it would subdue the effects of the medicine at any point.
She wanted to live, but she could never imagine living life without drinking again. It was her source of entertainment, her source of escape from all the problems that she refused to face all these years. She stared at the light reddish drink in a martini glass. It was calling on her. She wants that drink. She needs that drink. She could not live without drinking. She looked around the bar to tell someone her dilemma and yet, of all the good times she had with any of them, they were not her friends, not truly. With a sigh, she took one look at the drink and got up. She walked out of the bar and vowed never to come back again.
Justis' MultiStories 