The first time I buy alcohol in Europe, I’m in Switzerland with Julia for a quick weekend trip. We stumble into a

corner store to get a break from the February cold. I’m bundled in a V-necked blue coat with a gray scarf and a red hat and red gloves. I look like a walking Crayola box. We pick up a bottle of wine, something yellow with a butterfly on it. There’s a matching lime green one right next to it that we also want to try, but we’re college kids visiting a very expensive country.

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I’m 19; Julia’s 21. 

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“Here, you buy it,” I say.

“No,” she says. “I’m gonna look for food. You buy it. You’re legal here.”

The cashier greets me in French. I choke out a broken greeting back, but his expression doesn’t change, even

though I basically stamped “AMERICAN TEENAGER” on my forehead. I pay, take the bottle, and that’s it. He doesn’t give me a second glance, but I wordlessly hand Julia the wine to carry back to the hotel.

 

 

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In America, alcohol is a hot commodity. It’s something to hoard for parties and pregames and Wednesday

nights. As a college sophomore, I did drink relatively often, had been to the occasional party, but never enough to black out. I had never even been to the bars off campus.

In Luxembourg, where our college study abroad trip is located, it’s my host mom casually pouring me a glass of white wine with dinner, and refilling it without so much as a blink when I finish it.

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It’s just as easy to buy a six-pack of Boefferdings as it is to buy a candy bar. 

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But alcohol is expensive, so our ratio of “meals with alcohol” to “meals without alcohol” isn’t too bad. We do

alcohol-related activities, too, sometimes with the university.

 

 

 

In Croatia, on a university-sponsored field trip, we visit a winery that used to be a minefield, because the

country still hasn’t recovered from its 1991-1995 civil war and has over 17,000 undetonated landmines. We’ve just visited a museum full of pictures of kids who should be my parents’ age but instead died at mine. Maybe that’s why the mood in the winery is so artificial, 

 

sickly sweet like the rosé poured into my glass. 

It burns my throat going down. 

 

I buy a bottle for the drive home, because it’s truly some of the best I’ve had and I stopped being afraid of

cashiers four months

 

and four glasses ago,

 

and most of my classmates follow suit. I feel a little guilty when we spend the bus back ignoring the war-torn

lands and playing music from someone’s light-up speaker.

 

 

 

In Portugal, a few weeks later, Kelly and Natalie and I take a Port wine tour. Port wine is delicious—the alcohol

is completely drowned by its thickness and sweetness, and it tastes like molasses, but more fruity and less gingery and slightly thinner. When drinking it, you’re supposed to hold the glass by its stem and avoid touching the round part, because it’s served at a perfectly cool temperature and your fingertips will warm it up.

 

Or something.

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We’re on our seventh sample; I’m trying to pay attention, because I have to learn something on each trip, but

the guide’s words are blending together.

This last one is my favorite, a deep red that matches the gloves I wore to Switzerland all those months ago,

and it swirls its way up to my head, 

 

jumbling my thoughts

until they spell out a reminder to buy a bottle before we leave tomorrow.

 

There are other people on this tour. I don’t remember their names or what they look like. 

I do remember that they’re German, and in their mid-20s, and med students. I keep making eye contact with

one of them, a cute one, and we go out for drinks with them.

Later, we say our goodbyes, 

 

make our drunken promises to see each other again

 

even though their flight leaves at some ungodly hour tomorrow,

and Natalie’s so sunburnt she matches my wine and my gloves, 

and no one remembers anyone’s names.

 

 

 

The Saturday before I leave Europe, I wake up to someone nudging my left arm, not too kindly. I see a white

ceiling,

white walls,

a white face staring down at me.

 

It’s a nurse, I realize. I’m in a hospital.

 

The nurse who nudged me is speaking French, but my eyes glaze and he quickly switches to English. While

he’s talking, another nurse wraps up the crook of my right elbow, where an IV used to be. I’m bleeding bad enough that I must have pulled it out myself sometime in the night. Later, there will be a dark circular bruise there, 

as if someone grabbed me too hard.

 

But for now, the male nurse hands me a bag containing my clothes 

and my passport. 

 

I sit up and swing my legs over the bed railing, sliding forward just a bit. I ask him what happened, and he

doesn’t react to how shaky my voice is, 

to how I’m suddenly blinking back tears.

 

“You drank too much,”

 

he says, his voice as cold as the floor beneath my bare feet. 

 

“You were really quite careless. 

You’re okay now, 

but don’t do it again.”

 

My friends and I had gone out last night to celebrate our last weekend abroad. I wasn’t planning on having

more than a few drinks. Just enough to get me buzzed; not nearly enough to end up here.

 

I don’t tell the nurse that.

​

He hands me a phone and says to call someone,

but I don’t have my phone so I don’t know anyone’s numbers. 

 

I tell him that.

​

“Well, you can’t leave without someone coming to pick you up.

Your friend gave us your address when she dropped you off—

you’re with Miami University?

We’ll give them a call.” 

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Then he walks away.

 

I don’t care who they call, because I just want to go home,

but I know no one at the school will pick up because it’s 6 AM on a Saturday.

 

I don’t tell him that either.

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Instead, I just perch on the side of the hospital bed.

A woman comes up to me and asks if I know where something is. I tell her I don’t, and she picks up on the fact that I’m three inches away from the edge and asks if I’m okay.

“I think so,” I say.

“I was out with my friends last night,

but I don’t remember any of it, 

and I just woke up here.”

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Even though she’s wearing a mask, I can tell her face softens. 

​

“Oh, that’s horrible.

I’ve had things like that happen to me back in my day.

Remember to always watch your drink,

and don’t accept anything from anyone.

It wasn’t your fault, though.

You’ll be alright.

I hope you get home soon.”

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Then she heads down the hallway.

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All around me, life goes on.

My nurse calls the school,

gives up when they don’t pick up,

and gossips with the other nurses. 

People walk in and out of appointments. 

The clock shifts to 6:30, 

 

7:45,

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8:15.

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But my world stops.

​

I’m left grasping at straws, because her words never even occurred to me until she said them,

 

because things like that don’t happen to someone normal like me.

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My mind wanders out of my head and down the hallway, leaving me sitting on the edge of that hospital bed,

clutching my hands tightly.

 

 

​

I live on the same street as the hospital, maybe ten minutes away, but I don’t get home until after 11:00 AM.

Kelly and Natalie walk me there, and I’m shaky, because I’m starting to realize that things just aren’t adding up.

 

I remember taking a drink from someone.

I remember there being other people in the bar.

My friends aren’t mad at me, even though I’m mad at me.

 

At one point, Kelly tells me about things I was doing last night, and says, “It just didn’t seem like you.”

Then I’m taken back to an earlier conversation we had in France, clutching fizzy glasses of champagne, where

she says that what tipped her off to her friend getting roofied in Brick was that she wasn’t acting like her usual drunk self.

 

 

 

I pin my hospital bracelet to my corkboard when I get back to the US, next to ticket stubs and brochures,

because I don’t know what else to do with it. It looks like a prize you win with a loyalty card. 

 

You had this many drinks in this many countries—

you get a free hospital stay!

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I’m not scared of drinking, or bars, or anything like that. I don’t wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the

night, dreaming of distant memories. There aren’t any memories to dream of. Life just goes on, like that fateful morning. It doesn’t stop so I can have my moment and figure out what went wrong.

It could have been a significant lapse in judgment; it could have been something much more sinister. But it

was a blip on an otherwise amazing experience, a blip that I don’t let dull the rest of my memories from Europe.

 

Life goes on, the world keeps turning, and one day, it’ll leave that blip far behind.