Hungover Dreams of Warm Fields

Is being hungover a valid reason to leave the country? Right now, I can hear three things that make me wonder what it would be like to live somewhere quiet and distant and probably with a windmill. I can hear a train going through town; the horn is going off and it weirdly sounds like a boat. I can hear my bedroom fan which is chugging away, little brave thing has been working so hard every summer for years. And I can hear my own heavy, clumsy breathing. I sound like I’ve just come up from a 60 foot free dive, but all I’ve done is walk to the living room to feed the cat.

With all the noise here, I can’t help but wonder what it would feel like to be hungover in one of those pleasant little villages you only really see in movies. What would it be like to stumble outside and cry a little because I don’t have sunglasses if I did it in the village from Beauty and the Beast? Would I be chased out of the Shire for barfing off a bridge and falling asleep in whatever field I can find? It sounds incredible. I bet the grass would be soft and just warm enough. I bet the only real noise would come from light human life and not the heavy stuff that bumbles through town with trains and breathes all over the place.

For as long as I’ve been getting hangovers, I’ve had this, admittedly weird, idea that it would feel very soothing to be buried up to my arms in a cool patch of grass, kind of like at the beach when you lie down and people kick sand on you until you look like a wayward torso getting a tan. I want that but with grass growing over me and birds in nearby trees.

Right now, I am not buried in a patch of grass at the edge of a whimsical village. I am sitting on the edge of my bathtub evaluating how many chips I ate last night and wondering if it could ever be possible to talk to the person who made the decision to eat so much of something we know can take us down in the morning. I’d like to write myself a letter to be opened next time I’m as drunk as I was last night, which was somewhere between fun librarian and foolish donkey. I’d write to tell myself that we can have a good time without making future me want to run away somewhere nice to purge myself of all the oily evil I put in my guts. I’d tell myself that thinking of a windmill will somehow make us even sicker and feel better about ourselves, so maybe just help out and don’t drink enough for this confusing image to take hold. I’d tell myself that rum is such a bad idea.

Oh gosh. I’m going to sit in the shower and see if hot water can make me feel more like a person. Maybe later somebody will put me in the ground.