Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

“We were just trying to collect stories for each other,” she tells me now, whenever I question how we could all have had such an infantile appetite for recklessness and such little self-awareness. “That’s what we traded in. It wasn’t to show off to anyone else but each other.”

I was a six-foot human metal detector for fragments of potential anecdotes, crawling along the earth of existence, my nose pressed to the grass in hopes of finding something to dig at.

My friends and I continued to believe what we were doing was a great act of empowerment and emancipation.

I could feel myself pushing my life away and became more and more absorbed in a completely false sense of control.

Little did he know that “just hair” was all I thought I was good for. Just hair, just collarbones, just sit-ups. “Just” was all I had expended my energy on for the best part of a year and it’s all I thought I was worth.

As I got older and mercifully more aware of what a precious gift a healthy working body is, I felt ashamed and bewildered that I could have treated mine so badly.

He was just “a night,” of which I wanted many. An experience, an anecdote, a new face, a memory. He was a piece of advice, a gossipy story, and an interesting fact that lodged in my inebriated, unconscious mind, only to be pulled out and regurgitated as my own one day.

I am relieved, energized, invigorated that I can eat breakfast foods for dinner, play records really loud, and have a cigarette out of my window.

There was a freedom in the feeling that our house was fundamentally too broken to fix.

I thought that, to be a writer, I had to be a collector of experiences. And I thought every experience worth having, every person worth meeting, only existed after dark.

“One day we will sit in a nursing home, Dolly, bored out of our minds and staring at the quilt on our laps,” she said. “And all we will have to make us smile are these memories.”

Growing up engenders self-awareness. And self-awareness kills a self-titled party girl stone-cold dead.

I always saw alcohol as the transportation to experience, but as I went through my twenties I understood it had the same power to stunt experience as it did to exacerbate it.

Years later, I would discover that constantly behaving in a way that makes you feel shameful means you simply will not be able to take yourself seriously and your self-esteem will plummet lower and lower.