Champagne

I like champagne. It’s a regrettable confession, but a true one nonetheless. I like the way the bubbles rise to the surface of the glass and just sit there, somehow content with the ephemerality of their existence. If I was a bubble, I’d fight against it. I’d fight until I’d float straight out of the glass and up to the ceiling. I would.

         But instead I’m a writer, holed up in a basement apartment with a sole, grimy window. Writers aren’t supposed to like champagne. No, writers are supposed to drink hard liquor; the kind that slides down your throat like listerine and lingers menacingly, your esophagus on fire. Drink it like a man.

         Hemingway was a man. But he drank mojitos. You see, even Hemingway put sugar with his rum.

         In another life, I was a wine maker. I lived in France and my feet stomped grapes. Sometimes, when I’m still and quiet, a moment or a dream from my former life floats up from my soul to my mind. Ah oui. Bien. Les raisins sont frais. But only sometimes. Most of the time I just end up tracing my boredom with skinny fingers on the ceiling until I fall asleep.

         One cold morning in February, I rose before the sun. I set my feet heavenward and peeled back the sky’s shroud. And Céleste was there; Céleste with the light skin and the thin, lithe frame. We exchanged knowing looks like we had done once before; in Mayberry when she was drunk in my arms. I am a martini, she had said then, her breath smelling sweetly stale. I remember shaking my head. No, you’re not. You are exquisite; the alcoholic equivalent of a faery princess. You are champagne. And she had just looked at me knowingly.

      But in February, she wasn’t in my arms. She wasn’t drunk. She was the moon and I was the lone meteor who watched her from afar with inexpressible feelings. I didn’t worship her. I didn’t want her. I didn’t anything. I just watched.

      We found Céleste one morning in January, dead in the rain; except she wasn’t quite dead and it wasn’t raining. Her body was battered and bruised; her faery wings all crumpled. I traced her face with my skinny fingers and cried.

      On the day that I finally dry out like a raisin, I’ll be born again as a bubble. I’ll rise and rise higher than the rooftops and the towers and the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere…up into the thermosphere. There, near Céleste, my body will finally burst. A quick pop at first and then a fiery trail in the sky.

      Damn Fitzgerald’s gin, tonic or not; vermouth or not. I like my champagne.