Y0Addenda.5

In Which Our Author Drank Too Much on New Years Eve

“Hey!” Annabelle announced herself with a pillow to Bel’s face. “It’s like ten. Up time.”

“What’re you? The alarm…police?” Bel groaned, voice croaky, stretching dramatically with her eyes squeezed shut.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Nor do Quokka’s. Go throw pillows at them and leave me ‘lone.”

“Jesus.” Olivia appeared in the doorway in an Oodie and sunglasses, hair everywhere and nursing a mug of coffee. “You look like shit, panda-eyes. How much did you end up drinking last night?”

“It’s actually impressive.” Anna smirked, perching beside Bel on the edge of the bed.

“Bel, no.”

“Bel, yes…” Bel grabbed for the pillow, pulling it over her face to block out the sun. “Gooood…I don’t even get hangovers, what the fuck?”

“Well, when you decide to not so much drink the vodka as fucking mainline it - “ Anna countered.

“ - Shut up and get me a coffee.”

“On it.” Olivia nodded, leaving Anna and Bel to it.

“Do you think we have a drinking problem?” Bel asked, removing the pillow from her face, eyes still squeezed shut.

“Well, we don’t have a problem drinking, that’s for sure.”

“Ha.” Bel deadpanned.

“I think we have a reality problem. We use alcohol as medicine because it makes things in our head less loud. Which is…only a problem relative to how loud things are. Things were pretty loud in there last night, weren’t they?”

“Yeah.” Bel nodded sadly.

“You wanna talk about it?”

“Not particularly. I’m not at risk. This wasn’t…the other thing. It’s just…” Bel forced her eyes to open and meet Anna’s. They felt…sore, and her vision was slightly out of focus. “The horrors persist, but so do we.”

“Mmm.” Anna nodded sagely. “You should start doing the water thing.”

“Huh?”

“Y’know…every drink you have, have a glass of water? You should try that.”

“You should eat my ass.”

“No thank you.”

“We never get hangovers. This is an exceptional circumstance. I don’t need a mitigation strategy, I need…” Bel paused, considering. “A hug, probably?”

“Can do.” Anna nodded, leaning down and in to wrap Bel up in a firm embrace. “I’m gonna ask again, you realise.” She mumbled into Bel’s shoulder.

“It’s the whole…’credits roll’ thing.”

“Ahh. Right. That.”

“Yeah. Like…there are all these moments in life where it feels like a milestone has been achieved, like you’ve found a point of closure, or catharsis. On a certain level, it feels like…victory. Act Three is done with. Credits roll. And then you wake up, and nothing’s changed.”

“And then people are just like ‘Happy New Year’, and you’re just like…”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Fuck. ‘We must imagine Sisyphus Happy’ is such infantilising fucking cope, y’know?”

“I don’t love absurdism just generally. I think I’m too self-serious for all that. All just sounds like ‘life is meaningless, nothing matters, so craft a scooter from an ostrich egg and ride it to the moon’ or whatever. Absurdism, to me, always sounds like someone hit a seam of very true, very irrefutable existential logic, and it just…broke them so badly that they started spouting aphasiac gibberish. Like…Camus? Camus of all people wants to imagine Sisyphus happy? Camus, the dude who wrote ‘The Stranger’, claiming the absurd isn’t miserable and crushing? Like…I get why I have to keep pushing the boulder. I get why, the morning after an ending, I have to drag my ass out of bed and continue the emotional time-loop of persisting, unchanged, in the face of what should have changed me. Changed…all of it. But don’t fucking tell me to be happy about it. Sure, tell me to try to find meaning elsewhere, or persist for moments of transcendence or equilibrium, but to suggest I should be happy about rolling the boulder? Get absolutely, disrespectfully fucked.”

“Yeah. Also, like…if there’s meaning to be found in the absurd, it’s probably in the weight of it. The lightness, the heaviness, as opposed to resignation to it, which is basically saying ‘fuck how heavy it is or isn’t, just take the weight and shut the fuck up’. Not very punk. And, truly, I don’t think it’s just us who feel that way. I mean…Sartre wasn’t just disagreeing with Camus on the absurd because he was sick of Albo trying to fuck his girlfriend.”

“Oh my god Anna,” Bel laughed: “Can we not…reduce Simone The-Second-Sex De Beauvoir to being some girl two giant nerds were in a dick-measuring contest over?”

“I mean she wasn’t just that, but she was that.”

“Sort of. But if we’re on the absurd, I feel like she had them both logically outclassed. De Beauvoir treated the absurd as more like…a situational response, I guess, not a unifying human experience. Which I agree with: I have no idea if anyone else experiences absurdity the way I do. I * do* know we’re all shackled to the problem of what we owe each other, and I’d agree that the absurd is one way that tension manifests. And uh…love-triangle wise? Simone and JP were poly and she still wasn’t interested in Camus’s depressive, chain-smoking, probably bipolar ass as anything beyond a drinking-buddy-slash-debate partner.”

“God Simone de Beauvoir was cool.” Anna sighed, sliding into the bed and laying beside Bel, curling into her.

“Yeah. She was fucking incredible.” Bel nodded, yawning quietly. Olivia appeared in the doorway with a mug of coffee, slowly walking it over to Bel’s bedside table. Placing it down, she raised an eyebrow at Anna and Bel.

“You two are so fucking gay. Truly.”

“Go fuck yourself, Liv.” Anna murmured, before looking up with a silly little smile. “Oh, wait, you already do. That’s like…your defining character trait.”

“Yeah, thanks to this bitch.” Olivia chuckled, nodding towards Bel.

“Fuck off. You guys write yourselves, I just happen to be holding the proverbial pen.”

“Careful, Bel. That’s dangerously close to something we agreed we weren’t going to talk about.” Olivia warned with a wry smile.

“Shut uuuup.” Bel whined, burying her face in the pillow. “This is why you’re my least favourite.”

“Well that’s a fucking lie, now isn’t it?”

“Liv: you gonna join us, or…?” Anna asked.

“Yeah, fuck it. Seems like a bit of a queer-platonic cuddle puddle kind of morning.”