You know that feeling? That last proverbial straw, caught in the random winds of fate, floating down, oh so gently, onto the camel’s back? That moment your soul shudders and buckles under a weight invisible, impossible, but still debilitating? When optimism seems like a phrase in a textbook, to be regarded with academic curiosity rather than empirical application?
You can swing a six-pack in one hand. Cardboard holder sliding across your calluses, bottles shifting loosely as gravity does its best to turn them into pavement shards. Even with one in each hand, the six-pack feels carefree; you’re 10 dollars closer to broke, but the risk is low.
Since March, the weight never relents. As soon as you think you’ve beaten your personal record in ability to shrug and heave under the absurdity of it all, something else adds to the pile. You’re strained. Sprained. Contained. There’s little you can do but push the rock upwards, intellectually knowing there is a top while emotionally dreading the inevitable roll back down to the bottom.
A 12-pack requires two hands. Many a hubris-hardened college fool has learned the hard way what happens when wet cardboard meets the downward force of over a gallon of beer and glass. Brace and squat. Lift with your legs. Stack two, if you’re feeling alive.
There’s little to hold onto. Normal is a shadow that we reference in jokes. I imagine this is what a warzone feels like; such immediate and immense overhaul of traditions and routines, no places of escape to reset, introspect, adjust. Unpresented, unprecedented.
Six beers feel like a weekend tryst. 12 beers feels like a relationship. You’re in it for the long haul, and you can feel it in your triceps as they slide from trunk to fridge. The clanking of loose glasses are giggles of inside jokes. You’ve made a decision—a commitment—to this beer. Maybe one of the only constants you can find in a world that done lost its mind.
The muscles in your neck carry the tension of the day, the week, the month, the year. Every tweet, every callous dissent, every manifestation of cruelty and evil crunches your spine even lower. Hope. Yes. Please! But it seems—even in the brightest spots—to have forsaken this place.
Little bottle caps all in a row. Uniforms of soldiers in formation; unflinching, unmovable, a constant. You’re loath to remove one and break their geometric perfection, but beer is made to be opened. Admire them for now, for they’re a connection to the before, but also a dedication to the beyond.
From sand to glass, from grain to mash, a reminder that we’re all still here behind masks and closed doors.
You can’t read the facial expressions. We might as well have become another species. It looks like a smile, but without the cues we’ve spent thousands of years refining, it’s hard to tell.
