She picks the blue bottle because it reminds her of better times. The wine is German, fruity, but it reminds her of the first campaign, when it was blue and red, and they were all together. Now everything is crumbling. Red looks strong and blue has divided them.
She's alone in her apartment and its mid-afternoon. She doesn't know how it has happened or why, but she asks no questions. She only picked out the blue bottle and brought it upstairs with her, sliding it out of the brown bag and realizing that she needs a corkscrew. It doesn't matter that it's not quite three and she's alone.
It is a struggle to pull out the cork, once she has located a corkscrew. She had to settle for a Swiss army knife her father insisted that she took with her from home. It is not the first time that she has used it and it reminds her of how far she has come. She takes the first drink right from the bottle.
The wine inside the blue bottle is a golden white, blonde. It is the colour her hair would be in the sunlight, if it were translucent. And it smells of those heady days when anything was possible. The alcohol rushes right to her brain and she can feel the warm haze settling there. It reminds her that she hasn't eaten since yesterday.
She decides that it makes her feel too much like an alcoholic to drink out of the bottle, alone at three in the afternoon. But she has no wine glasses. Her roommate took them when she moved out with her cat and her microwave. She settles for a regular glass, too wide and too tall for proper appreciation, she knows. But she doesn't need to appreciate.
Standing in the middle of her kitchen, looking around at the half-emptied cupboards, she wonders if she has any food. She could order in, but tonight is her night, even if she has started it early. She finds frozen waffles shoved in the back of the freezer. And her toaster is still sitting on the counter.
Scraping the frost off of her waffles, she puts them in the toaster to cook and scrounges some syrup from a cupboard. Then she wanders to her bedroom. Her suitcase is sitting by the door, as though this were just another of the many hotel rooms she has frequented. She opens it, shifting aside the neatly folded stacks of clothing in search of her favourite flannel pyjamas.
By the time she has changed, she remembers why her roommate had left the toaster and has to scrape off a few charred bits on one side before turning it over to defrost the other. She has finished her first glass before the waffles are cooked.
The tension that seemed to be permanently a part of her has started to leech away. She has work to do still tonight, but that, unlike her blue bottle of wine, can wait.
Taking her second glass of wine, she lounges on the couch, reacquainting herself with how bad daytime television could be. She had let her cable lapse months ago. She had never had the time to watch it, and now the lack of instant news was almost comforting. Although, for some reason, the lone Spanish channel her antenna picked up was showing coverage of the things that she wanted to see. But it cost too much effort to follow the Spanish and she changed the channel back to the Young and the Restless. Or it might be the Bold and the Beautiful. Or any of the other soap operas she had never had the time to follow.
Yes, the young boy says, rolling his eyes at the pretty girl across from him, because helping an old lady find her purse qualifies me for sainthood.
Her memos and briefings are in her briefcase, sitting within reach at the end of the sofa. But she doesn't reach out for them, instead taking up her glass again. She swirls the liquid around inside the glass, knowing that it is the wrong shape and the wrong time to be evaluating the wine, midway into her second glass.
But when she takes her next drink, finding it too incongruous to sip wine from a glass it was not intended for, she finds that she cannot help but savour it, feeling the different tastes combining on her tongue. And the warmth that lingers at the back of her throat after the liquid itself is gone.
And you taught me to care about someone else as much as I care about myself, the girl on the television tells the boy.
It's the cue for her to return her plate, with bits of black still clinging to the crystallized syrup, to the sink. She returns in time to hear the girl tell the boy, No, no, Dylan. You have your passion.
Perhaps that's what she's missing, she realizes as the boy echoes her thoughts. Not anymore I don't, he says.
Her gaze drifts from the couple to the black briefcase at her feet and she remembers the plate she dumped unceremoniously into the sink, without first stopping to rinse the last remnants of her freeze-burnt dinner down the drain. She knows she is being irresponsible in ignoring them both.
But then she takes another drink and reminds herself that it is not responsible to be drinking at alone at three-thirty in the afternoon. The thought should disturb her, but she has already discovered that it doesn't.
Because when you love someone, one of the two says in response to the other, their dreams become your dreams.
Maybe that's what the problem is, she thinks with a sudden flash of clarity. It has been so long since she has been alone that she has lost track of her own dreams. She has been so caught up in the American dream that she has lost her own. Or maybe they were left behind somewhere along the way, forgotten in some state, maybe red and maybe blue, along the way.
Or maybe she never really had any to begin with. Had she ever really wanted blonde-haired, blue-eyed children running around a perfectly tended home? Or has she just convinced herself that she did to please her parents and satisfy her boyfriends? Had she ever really wanted the titles and responsibility of the White House? Or has she just been caught up in the excitement?
Somewhere along the way, whether in the red blood or the blue states, she had lost herself. And somewhere in the red states or the blue bottles, she would find herself again.