I looked up at her, “Do you know why people drink too much? Why they push themselves over the limit?” It was a sincere question that I wanted to know the answer to.
She set her drink down, looked around the bar, and pursed her lips. Her eyes stared right through me, perhaps searching for words. She looked at me again, with her mouth barely open.
“Not everyone drinks to get drunk, or have a one night stand. People drink to forget. People drink to cope. People drink to be ghosts of their past. Every shotglass that someones drank, its a cry for help. If you listen closely, you can hear what they say through their ***** and salt.” Three clinks from glass hitting the table shortly followed.
“Did you hear it? They said ‘I lost my job’, ‘my boyfriend cheated’, and the most common one that I hear, ‘I’m unhappy’.”
Her eyebrows shot up, a greater understanding shining through her eyes. “I think thats why so many shy people are so good at art. They’re not good at expressing themselves in words, so they do it through lines and colors.”
She stopped speaking for a moment.
“It’s like…your favorite alcoholic drink says a lot about you.”
And with that, she finished her margarita, stood up, and left.

I wonder what that said about her.

It all began as the shotglass took my hand,
Leading me into the ***** waltz that had become so necessary for me to survive the evening.
We bought ***** for each other, me and these people I end up drinking with.
There was that girl who told me she liked loneliness, but forgot those claims eight hours later.
And the guy in my apartment building who only comes over when he hears the word “she”.
But tonight I am happy with them, because tonight I am blind.

Me and these humans, we danced and we shrieked and we felt like gods,
And between drowning sessions, we found our tongues down strangers’ throats;
They explain that they were “so wasted” (and I wordlessly agree that yes, we certainly are.)
Laughter and a false forgiveness follow their excuse.

We catapulted ice cubes into Britney’s mouth, and I sat there, quietly watching them melt,
The cold water trickling past the white veneer of her teeth and kicking in the cavities.
Her strawberry-flavored lips quivered against both the liquid’s biting chill, and the iciness of my gaze.
Her giggles slowed to a silence as I stared at the skin beneath her nose, raw from constant waxing.
And as I pondered why I was sitting there, the group of uncertain eyes all looked at me, disappointed in my disconnection.
“Shots for Scott! Shots for Scott!” they chanted. I sighed, accepted, and stopped all that seeing once again.

Oh these people, I hate them but I love them because they are easy to use as friends,
And, like mannequins playing with dolls, we take each other out of the toy chest on the whim.

We flocked from our secondhand nest, and flew up the backroom stairs.
Exploding at the top of the discotheque in a fervor, we lied at the top of our lungs:
“This is the best night ever!”, “I don’t know where I am!”, “I am happy!”.
I vomited between the screaming and the listening.

After ten or so of these claims, they were just shrieking swears at passerbys.
There was too much bile and not enough bliss here,
So I stood up on the ledge, and started to tango by my lonesome.
They laughed at the insanity of it all, and called me “crazy” and “free-spirited”.
Dean tried to scramble up too, and make an equal spectacle, but I didn’t see his climb (I’m blind, remember?), and I slipped on his hand.

And as though my strings were cut, my appendages weakly fluttered as I fell.
I looked up to gaping faces, covered mouths, but no outstretched arms.

It was then that I wrote my philosophy of life, but before I could write it down proper, my vertebras folded back as my frame flattened against the pavement.
It’s a shame I couldn’t, because when I opened my mouth to exclaim it with the air left in my punctured lungs,
All that I could hear was the bass of the club’s dance music, and the sound of parking cars.

I've been here before
Listened to your feet crunch the shards of glass and shattered hearts
Wiping the remnants of liquor and bitterness from liar's lips
As your night of sugarcoated revelry comes to an end 
The facade falls
Cracks
Echoing with the slam of a shotglass that pulses through ears
And thumps through my brain with your sneer of rejection
Your eyes don't shy from mine
But they are discolored with arrogance
Hardened by vanity
As cold and empty as the bottle that sweats against my palm
If I close my own
I could reach for a memory of the past
For a sunbeam's reflection highlighting the contours of your skin
Or the childish purity in unquestioned belief
But tonight, they will stay locked 
I will watch the candied venom drip from your curling lips, drawing me back under a veil of falsity
And see us for what we really are
I am no longer the same.
I won't be your entertainment
Your distraction
Your pastime or plaything
The show is over.
I've been here before 
But this is the last time I'll come back.

The ocean knows.
Fill the world's largest container with it,
Or a shotglass. A thimble.
It will not care. It cannot care;

Nothing is ever removed

From anything.

his bloodshot eyes reflect nothing but a desire
to quench a thirst, one that I don't understand
and probably never will.
love is always followed by a question mark.
it's much like the times that he,
stumbling on the pile of excuses left
haphazardly near the door,
poured his reasons into tall glasses,
and dipped the rims in salt.
tonight will the moon break in half,
sending its shards into his smile again?
it gleams there, the magic that is made every night.
stars melt and are blended, and we drink.
but it is so empty, this hydration.
as full of magic as his eyes are, as his smile is,
they are both filled in equal amounts with pain.
and I can't help but feel as though I am
a mere waitress to his desires, asking if he wants that
on the rocks or straight up.
and if love came served in a shotglass,
he'd be all over that.

"Youre such a baby!"
The words I suppose will define my first and most crucial flaw.
The irrepairable error I cant get away from.
Ya know, at this point though, hearing the words flow from your mouth nowadays,
"Youre such a baby!"
It seems more and less applicable.
When you first said it I was most definitely a baby, freshly able to call myself 16 and I thought I was head over heels then. But nowadays I find myself being semi childish over you and then I remember were not actually anything were just whatever and I just hear it,
"Youre such a baby!"
Hm.
The phrase haunts her mind like a specter she sometimes forgets about; but its always there
Im sorry.
I feel like my dreams grow bigger and realer every day and they include you more and more but then theres days where I just feel like if I was the last person on earth youd walk on bye humming.
"Im a ******* baby"
Its weird. I dont think im a baby at all and then you make me remember.
I still need to remember to learn from children that nothing is as serious as I let it seem.  Every day you lose a tiny bit of interest in me and I watch it. I feel like im watching the water from my fishbowl evaporate. I noticed you think you can pick out certain life images from people to decide your compatibility. That is so intuitive but the edges of our puzzle pieces dont really fit every day.
"If we never date we never break up"
I dont really care if we date losing you is gonna **** again. But when the day comes I know well cope. Youll yoga me away and skip the shotglass, Ill probably roll more blunts than my throat is ok with and convince myself im all I need. I dont feel deserving of you and your imperfectionsz So much bounces around my head when I write right now that only like 10% of what I need to come out is coming out.
It feels like im trying to pull only my matching socks from a spinning laundry machine.
I need to just chill.

I stare,
The outsider looking in.

******* comment,
Or a practiced defence?

Cigarette slowly shrinking,
Ember glowing bright.

Out of options,
Out of time.

Walls closing in,
Creeping like vines.

Shotglass is full,
unlike the bottle.