We remember things differently as children than we do as adults: a wide eyed whispering. Each thing as it is, handed like breath, a wave, inevitable.
That night, in the middle of the night I was weaving my way from bed, nylon nightgown clinging to my legs and the sound of muffled laughter, dim light. Wandering down the glossywood stairs to find water, and you. “Lisa,” someone said to get your attention, unable to find you; then they were twittering, around me: “You’re so cute, look at you.”
There was the wooden-carved chest with high legs my parents served Thanksgiving on, covered with big glass bottles, punch a rich red-pink, glasses and ice. I remember that crystal bowl, too heavy for me to carry.
Mom and Dad were traveling somewhere—was it Bermuda?— and there was a feeling of strangeness in this house, filled with other people, but without the holiday of introductions, polite faces, shaking hands, or hugs. My body felt simple in its shoeless night, my unbrushed hair.
Your laugh; the gap between your yellowed teeth, freckled face, those green eyes squinting, wrinkled at the edges. “You’re a riot,” you would say, and I didn’t know what that meant:—wasn’t that a loud thing, bad, people screaming?—but I liked that I amused you, the smell of your cigarette-smoked skin, your flannel shirt close to me as you pulled me into the hollows of your arms, touched my head or hair. You would often let me stay up with you watching Fantasy Island, that show for older people, even way past bedtime—and hot chocolate with marshmallows, as many as I wanted.
Near the bowl, a half filled cup I lifted, curious, my lips on it. Sweet and sour. The murmur of music and the gravelly voices. A sip or two?
And then the blur, the blur. Room spinning and the wave of milling, nameless people until I stumbled toward a couch, more like a settee (my parents’ accumulated antique furniture, horse-hair-stuffed and stiff-brocaded, itchy fabric, nothing for children to land in), flopping like a sail, flat and open. When I fell into it, there was laughter, murmured caring. I was “adorable”; and also, “Is she ok?” I felt the cold air on my legs, peeking out from my smooth nightgown.
You must have carried me upstairs, later, tucked me in like any other night, so that in my warm-bed morning I didn’t even remember, except some awful sick, the way the gas felt in my nose when the doctor took my tonsils out, a smell like chemical-sweet and death. Did I think it was a dream?
Back from a family trip a few years later, the silverware was missing: my mother’s mother’s, all those shapes I’d polished on special occasions, proud to make them gleam. No one knew where it had gone, or how. We found out later your partner Gwen, squat and buzz-cut head, had unzipped that plaid suitcase, all those soft-cloth bags of heavy things, and taken them away, to sell.
I didn’t understand it then: your absence (which followed) and the no-more ringing gaggle of you in our house, my heart ripped with aching for you, wanting you back. (My parents saying you had had to go somewhere, had moved; then years before I knew the truth.)
I never told my parents this story either, maybe because it took years to understand the throat-swelled sip of that first drink, alcohol’s sway: seeing it then as a magical potion, a piece of life’s uncharted swells, without even knowing what I’d swallowed. The memory is of the motion, falling to the couch and the swirl of the ceiling; and not a judgement of you, or an outrage for my child self, endangered.
Now, the bright-prick light of waking up, life remembered differently, putting the pieces together like a puzzle. Oh, alcohol. Oh, your social-starved self in the cold of winter in Maine, delighted by a house you could fill with people and food and music, even if it wasn’t yours.
But there was so much love in my little heart, seeing things just as they were. Even now, to borrow some of it, even as I know and understand more, the flecked and bittered truths that age unravels. Loving it anyway. Loving myself anyway, for all the textured flaws, the uncomfortable furniture, the unexpected: sipped. And wherever you are, laughing Lisa, this party in you also, long-forgotten but maybe humming, like the sea.
A.S. Aubrey is a psychotherapist/writer working with trauma, chronic illness and identity in Los Angeles. Her work has been seen or is forthcoming in The Poets Corner’s Art & Ekphrastic Poetry exhibit, Cathexis Northwest Press, Jackdaw Haiku, Querencia Press and POETICS: Corvids (Bainbridge Island Press), among others. She was longlisted for the 2025 Westword Prize and shortlisted for the 2025 Clarissa Dalloway Prose Prize. Her poetry chapbook Hide & Seek: Poems for Being Found in a Lost World is forthcoming by Finishing Line Press in 2026.