Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

To make it more confounding, Miles wasn’t the same person I once dated. College was like a
phone-booth identity swap for him. He wore a rainbow knit beret now and grew his cute floppy bangs
into long spiraling curls. His goatee came to a point, like a billy goat, or Satan. As if he were daring
me not to love him anymore.
But I couldn’t stop, I explained to Anna as she nudged a box of Kleenex my way. I couldn’t let go
of him, even though I didn’t know him anymore. College girls weren’t supposed to be like this. We
were supposed to be cool. Unencumbered. Free. Instead, I’d become one of Those Girls—the ones
who drag their high school romance across the first year of college like a teddy bear on the ground.
As for the actual teddy bear Miles gave me, I still slept with it every night.
Anna didn’t have a boyfriend in high school. She was the valedictorian, and her closest
companions had been novels. She knew books the way I knew pop songs, and listening to her
sometimes made me wonder what I might have learned if I’d actually tried in my classes.
Anna was also proof that not all teenagers drink. She told me about this time when she was 18.
She had gone to a bar and seen two cute boys. She wanted to impress them, so she picked up someone
else’s beer can and gestured with it while she spoke. When the cops walked in, the guys darted for the
exit, while Anna got her first ticket. Anyone who got caught by the police said the same thing. “But,
Officer, it’s not mine.” And Anna might have been the first kid in history to be telling the truth.
We talked till dawn that night, and I was exhausted and exhilarated by the time I returned to my
thin foam mattress. Sometimes I call this evening “the night Anna and I fell in love,” and sometimes I
call it “the first night of our lives together,” but I can’t call it “the night we chain-smoked and ate
cheese pizza in Mark’s dorm room,” because that happened pretty often.
In the later years of college, she and I would drink wine on friends’ porches and sit together at
picnic tables messy with tortilla chips and margarita spills. Anna knew how to knock back drinks by
then. But in the first year we spent together, our adventures were limited to a 14-story dorm. We made
each other mix tapes. We wrote each other handwritten letters and dropped them in the post office
slot, even though we lived 150 feet apart, because we both understood the rush of getting mail. And
through our long and loping conversations, I began to discover Anna had an industrial-grade memory.
She could recall the most mundane details of my past. The make and model of Miles’s car. The names
of my cousins. It goosed me each time, like she’d been reading my journal.
Back in high school, an impeccable memory had been my superpower. I had archives of useless
knowledge: the number of singles released from Thriller (seven), the actor who played the villain in
The Karate Kid (Billy Zabka). Friends used to rely on me to fill in the backstory about our shared
past. This was before the Internet, when the very act of remembering could make me feel like a whiz
kid bound for a Jeopardy! championship. What was the name of our freshman-year health teacher
again? Where was that concert we went to in ninth grade?
And I would think, “How can people forget their own lives?”
But college introduced me to people like Anna, whose memories surpassed my own. And I was
dazzled by this, but I was also a bit intimidated, like a star high school athlete who’s joined the pros.
“How can you remember that?” I would ask her, dumbstruck.
And she would arch her left eyebrow, her favorite pose of feminine mystery, and let the question
dangle.
I tried to match her. I squirreled away biographical driftwood to lob into our conversations for a
future surprise. Bam! Bet you didn’t think I knew the name of your old coworker at the IHOP. Boom!