Making Promises

I didn't get drunk last night,
but I might have been a little tipsy.
Not too much to forget what happened,
because I remember what I did and said.

I talked to foreign men and avoided one person
who makes me more uncomfortable than anyone should.
I watched people smoke weed on the back porch
while I sat on a cold couch laughing with a short guy
drinking a pumpkin-flavored beer.
It was my second, but he said he's had too many to count.

I walked up a hill with some people I knew,
and more that I didn't, to get good food at half past eleven.
I didn't buy anything because I've
already indulged enough this week.
An Iranian man hid his beer in the bushes while we ate
on the roof. The bisexual man who sat in the next seat
ran away when another girl wasn't interested in him.

I had fun, but when we went to move her car,
I fully supported driving indefinitely. And we did.
We just drove and talked and everything I told her
had nothing to do with the alcohol.

At midnight I spent time with the gays,
and my father wasn't happy when he found out.
I spent a week with wet eyes, but ever since then
I've just been mad. She understood that.

At one she went to jail; she told me how
she never thought they'd get caught
out in the middle of a field in the middle of the night.
But they were, and she paid the price.
It almost ruined her life, but now she feels like
there was a reason for everything that happened.

By two I had left the church. I was fed up with the
hypocrisy, the double standards,
the twisted sexuality and unhealthy self-image.
She's heard it all and she still goes,
even though she calls herself a sinner. Though
she doesn't always live it, she believes it's right,
and it makes her happy. And that's what matters.

By three we're better friends than I could have imagined
when we began this five hours ago.
She didn't have anything to drink,
but she didn't need it to decide to trust me.
We told each other our stories and
heard those of everyone else:
the political activists and the potheads,
the already drunk people and the ones just getting started.
The people in the corners and at the center of attention.

I fell somewhere in between.
Not stone-cold sober
but not too drunk either.
I may have been a little tipsy,
but I remember every detail.