I was only eight years old when my brother came home wobbling and nauseous one night. I remember my mother’s aghast face as she ran up to him. She eventually stopped in her tracks and wordlessly stared at him. My father had a far more fearsome reaction. Upon stepping inside the living room, he almost dashed towards my brother. The next thing I knew, my brother got tackled to the ground.

I didn’t see the rest of the ruckus. My mother didn’t let me.

The following morning, I wanted very much to avoid my brother because my mother said that what he did was unacceptable and embarrassing. I believed her despite not knowing why my brother came home in that condition. I believed everything that she said.

In fifth grade, my mother was once again alarmed when her younger brother, my uncle, kept yelling slurs on the streets. The neighbors were scared too. When I went out of the house that night to catch a glimpse of what was happening, I was so confused. I watched him throw several bottles of beer on the road.

Ever since, I thought he was dumb and stupid. I thought that at his age, he could do so much better than that, like actually trying to deal with the situation more maturely.

When I asked my mother why he behaved that way, she said that I was too young to be engaging in conversations like that. She also said that the only important thing was I would never end up like him.

Why don’t people just stay sober?

I was never really bothered by my cluelessness about the reasons of both my brother and my uncle. All I believed I knew, they were out of their minds for doing something so brave yet so stupid.

In eighth grade, I overheard that some of the annoying lads from our batch secretly sat together in the dormitory from time to time to enjoy mojito. That was the first time when I felt the concern to know my brother’s and uncle’s reasons for getting drunk back then.

And so, while gazing at my father’s gin bottle on the counter and with sheer curiosity I never had before, I finally asked my mother and found out that my brother’s longtime girlfriend broke up with him and that my uncle’s wife who went overseas never called him back.

Well, I would never really fully understand until four years later.

I grew close to one of the cute girls in class when by circumstance, we began spending lunch breaks together with some of our common friends.

At first, I was just simply amazed by how she carried herself. I’ve always known that she could dance, but even when she was not dancing, she was still graceful and poised and sexy. When she spoke, it was like the whole world stopped moving and I thought I could see stars in her eyes. And when she smiled, there was some magic electricity running down my spine and I could not even move an inch.

I didn’t realize how much she meant to me until I learned that she would eventually leave the country to pursue higher studies abroad.

We were in twelfth grade. It was our very last year in high school and my very first time to fall in love (talk about having your first love at one of the worst times possible).

On graduation day, I didn’t want to see her go. Just the thought of her departure made me feel a creeping vine of thorns around my chest.

It was torture – that new and unfamiliar kind of pain, and I was clueless once again.

A month into college, two months after she left, I still found myself helplessly searching for her face in a crowd of people and aimlessly staring at the door, waiting for her to come inside.

But she was nowhere to be found in the crowd and she never entered the room… She just wasn’t there anymore.

And I thought I could never get used to that.

Since then, it has all completely made sense to me – why my brother came home drunk that night, why my uncle reeked of the beer bottles he threw on the road, and perhaps why some of my batchmates started drinking in the first place.

You know, quite a few bottles of beer can make all the difference, at least for a single night. The first sip is so tasty that it makes you crave for more and more and more until the booze starts to kick in. Your head feels a little lighter, and your mind gets a bit more teasing. You drain more bottles because it just tastes so well, and then suddenly, you’re brave and spontaneous, and it’s like you can’t even remember your reasons for coming to drink.

When you wake up a couple of hours later either alone or with your homies or beside a random stranger you just felt like flirting with, you feel a heaviness in your head and something rises from your stomach to your throat. That’s when you start rushing towards the bathroom, and despite feeling your head spin and throwing up on the toilet bowl, you smile a bit.

You begin to think maybe, you can get used to this. Maybe, it gets better. Maybe, it’s not the end of the world.

All you need to do is to spend countless more nights of fleeting forgetfulness and wild drunkenness out of a desperate attempt to distract yourself from remembering what you need not remember anymore, and trust me, it has worked for a lot of us.

One of the biggest reasons why people don’t stay sober is because they only want to cope, and they should never be judged for that.

I believe that while people should always be responsible with their actions, their own ways of coping should also never be judged as shameful or immature… even when one of them is drinking alcohol to escape sobriety.

At the end of the day, there’s only so much we can do with what we feel, especially with heartbreak. And it’s important that as long as we’re not harming anyone, we allow ourselves to cope however we want to.