Sometimes you remember.
Or, you suppose, sometimes you're no longer able to forget.
Sometimes the bottle is not strong enough to quell the hurt, to quench the flames of loss and grieving and sorrow, to quiet the screams that haunt your every-waking and every-slumbering thought.
You had hoped that after… how long it's precisely been you haven't the faintest clue… that perhaps you'd forget. That the shackles chaining you to the past would have dissolved in the acid you swallow every day. Every hour. Every minute. You spend each one trying to erase the last.
And still, sometimes you remember.
The memories have grown weaker in time, fading and blurring in detail as your brain slowly collapses under the weight of the bottle. They have almost become memories of memories; a caricature of the life you used to have.
It could be an animal. A glorious, winged beast that you once rode into battle, but now cannot discern the proper shape or size.
It could be a place. Or, at least, the idea of a place. The thought of home. You know its name, but you dare not let it enter your mind for fear of the temptation to return.
It could be a face. One blanketed in haze and shadows. A beautiful face; one you remember vividly enough to ache whenever it enters your fragmented mind.
Other times your memories are more abstract. You don't recall a person or a place or a thing, but an emotion. You feel rather than see. And if there is one thing you wish for less than remembering, it's feeling.
Sometimes you feel.
It could be an insignificant, small feeling. Annoyance as you lose a bet in the gladiatorial arena to the grand applause of thousands. Disgust as a bartender's eyes trail lower on your form than they have any right to. Boredom.
Whatever it is, it will hurt. Because one feeling —any feeling— is the tip of a sword piercing through your carefully-crafted alcoholic armor. And once the armor has been pierced the sword can go deeper, can penetrate your flesh, can drive itself through your heart.
The length of the sword is coated in a venom stronger than the poison with which you constantly fill yourself. Anger. Anxiety. Fear. Hurt. Loneliness. Sadness. And the hilt is the most potent toxin: love.
Sometimes you remember how it feels to love.
Love clears your blurry vision. Loves forces sobriety upon you. Love brings that shadowed, hazy, aching face into stark detail. Love floods you with memories of more than just a face: a person, a friend, a lover.
The person becomes a feeling in herself, one intrinsically linked with love.
A bitten lip and a wink during a stern royal ceremony. A hand creeping up your leg beneath the richest mahogany banquet table. A whispered cry of "I love you" amidst tangled sheets and waning candlelight. The heat in your cheeks. The tremble in your legs. The tingling of her lips on yours.
Sometimes you wish you could remember her name.
It's a passing, perhaps foolish desire. One brought on by the anguish of remembering how to feel. But you have it nonetheless. You might laugh at the sheer irony of it, if you could even remember how to laugh. The only thing you cared to remember lost in a sea of booze you choose to swim in. Perhaps it's your penance; the cost of living every moment in a drunken stupor.
Sometimes the sword even goes past the hilt, and the agony of longing floods your veins.
Longing is dangerous.
You long for the olden days. For bygone times when the bottle was a mere celebratory acquaintance, not your only constant companion. You long for the days when you could awaken without a screeching ache behind your brow, without the taste of sickness in your mouth, without the immediate need for another drink. You long for the golden city, for the home where you learned to fight, to live, to love. You long for your friends. For your sisters, the Valkyrior.
Most dangerously, you long for her.
Her presence, her smile, her lips, her touch, her name; verything about her that you've left behind.
When you long, you risk drowning. You pick up your bottle and you drink until your entire being burns. Until the burns knocks you off your feet onto the floor and you fade into unconsciousness. And when you long, your last thoughts before collapse are "I hope I never awaken again."
Sometimes you wonder why you don't just make the pain stop.
Why you don't choose a knife over poison. It would be easy. Painless, even. No more hurting, no more remembering, no more feeling. All impaled on the tip of a dagger you can so easily send through your heart.
But then you remember how much of a coward you are.
A coward who was weak enough to let her beloved die in her place, right in front of her. One weak enough to hide under the corpses of her fallen sisters and play dead to avoid Hela's wrath. One weak enough to let the sacred name of the Valkrie die every day she chooses to cower on this shithole rock instead of returning home to fulfill her duty to the throne.
Perhaps it's fitting. Perhaps your cowardice is a punishment in itself. Because the pain will not end as you're alive, and you're too weak to stop living. Your only respite will remain perpetually out of reach.
The only hope you have left in this world is that one day you will drown. That one day you'll swim too far into your sea of poison and you won't emerge. Your body will decay below the waves, lost to the ebb and flow of time as all things eventually are.
And so you drink.
You drink away the pain, the memory, the feeling, the ability to coherently think; everything. You drink until you feel sick. You drink until you vomit and then you drink some more. You drink until you pass out and then you begin drinking again the second you regain consciousness. You drink until you cry liquor and bleed wine.
Sometimes you remember.
And, if you drink enough, sometimes you forget.