My hands grabbed the cold sides of the toilet with urgency as I leaned over it to throw up, the repetitive beats of electronic music in the background rumbled in the woman’s bathroom of Le Bain, one of the fanciest nightclubs of Chelsea. It also was one of the only places in New York City with free entry. That I knew of, at least, and I knew a lot of places. As I knew that a single glass of wine was not enough to make a girl puke like I just did.
I was good at making stuff up, but I wasn´t gonna lie to myself about it.
When I made sure my stomach was completely empty I flushed the toilet. The sound it made was not really that different from the indie beats that came from the speakers outside. I stood up again. My gaze met the mirror to check that there were no splashes of vomit in my Ralph Lauren jacket. I washed my hands on the sink a few times and, after taking a breath, I headed out of the bathroom to the stairs; the graffiti walls were bathed in pink neon lights. The acid taste in my mouth disgusted me, but my body now felt slightly better than a few moments before, when I rushed inside the bathroom.
“You have vomit on your hair” my friend Celine said to me when she saw me looking in every direction, hoping to find her. She had the type of accent from the south of France that made her sound as if she had repeated that same thing to me a hundred times already. “You are aware of that, aren’t you?”
Her body was leaning against the wall, arms crossed as if bored, but she was smiling sympathetically. The neon light of the halway made her blue night dress sparkle.
Celine pointed to the strains of hair that escaped my improvised lower bun. I was so worried about my jacket, I had missed those. I looked into my purse for a tissue. Then pulled the hair tie to brushed my thick ginger locks with my fingers to make my mess look presentable again.
“What’s on my hair is not vomit, mon ami,” I realized. “This is just water. I washed my face a bit after throwing up”.
“Ah, so that’s why there is smudged mascara under your eyes. You look like a panda. A cute panda”, she gave me a mint gum as we went up the stairs, to the open rooftop, leaving behind the electronic music on the lower floor. “I thought you were crying or something. I was starting to get worried”.
“Crying too, but these tears are from the effort of throwing up”.
“I know the feeling,” she laughed. “But, now, seriously. Are you okay? I thought you hadn´t had that much to drink tonight”.
“Yeah, I guess the wine was stronger that I thought”.
It was not a lie, and Celine did not swallow my answer, but neither did she push me to get a different one.
What I really wanted on that moment was to stay at the party for a bit longer, and I knew if I said the truth; that my head bumped, that I feelt my body too hot, my stomach to twisted and felt a bit dizzy after the throw up, we would go back to the college dorms. And I was not ready for that just yet.
My head was throbbing after dancing electronic music downstairs for almost two hours, like it had its own DJ inside. As I started chewing Celine’s gum my stomach made a wierd sound. My arms had wrapped around my belly without me noticing. If my friend heard anything she did not make any sign of it.
We finally found our friend group in one of the high tables overlooking the skyline lights of lower Manhattan. We went to sit with them.
“Well, parties in the States are different, aren’t they?”
I felt like we always had the same opinion when it came to critizise on the american style of going out. It was different, sure, because we were used to the european way; the mediterranian parties with its charming wildness, the way everyone showed off their full dancing potential on the dance flor and the staying up till dawn schedule.
Not that I had gotten many chances of going out since I got here, other than fraternity parties. Given that I needed to ask for somebody else’s ID to get inside a bar or any other place where there was alcohol, I had to plan in advance.
Since I was still just twenty, every time I tried to get into these places, I got the excitement of entering there illegaly. It was thrilling to give to the guard at the entrance the driver’s license of my twentyone year old roommate Celine. Little things could compare to the feeling of smiling innocently while holding my breath waiting for him to check the ID and hoping he doesn´t notice the actual owner coming a few guys after me with her passport; with the same birth date, same picture, same photo, same name.
But I would get in every time, and so did Celine.
Someone in the friend group started joking about the indie music, to which none of us was really used to. Celine and the other French girl said that next time we should check the theme of the night before deciding where to go, some place where they put commercial music, to meet everyone’s tastes. They also added it would be nice if they played French songs, like “Djadja” or “Pookie”, the only ones they could name that the rest of us would recognize. To which me and the Dominican girl add that wherever we go, there has to be at least some Reggaeton songs, too. Then we turned to Angelo, the boy from Tuscany. We said we had to make sure they put Italian music as well, even when nobody in our table seemed able to name a single italian song.
“Oh, I know Volare” I say, remembering having heard it during the summer trips to Italy with my family. Despite trying to sound lively my voice shakes a bit and I can feel the fatigue in my face, as well as the weakness in my body. The taste of vomit has gone out of my mouth, but the rest of my body still feels it, like it can come back up burning through my throat without my consent or control at any moment.
“I’ll invite you to the next cocktail if you can sing just one line” he says to the group But I barely know any song myself”.
I start to hum the first line of the chorus, the only one I truly knew the correct words to, to which Angelo adds himself to follow the song in proper Italian.
“Volare, oh, oh. Cantare, oh, oh, oh, oh.” He song, “Nel blu, dipinto di blu”.
Then, Celine and the other French girl in the group, joined the improvised chorus for the same line Angelo was singing, but with the French version of the song. Other voices from the table next to ours start singing too, and even more emotively and louder than us, they sing the rest of the song with what to me seemed a perfect Italian pronunciation. Later, when the song was done and we started talking, we found out they were natives from northern Italy and were in New York City on their spring vacation.
Despite the vomiting and the unpleasant feeling that came after, I enjoyed that part of the night. My grandma often said that we, as humans, have the tendency to glorify the past, to feel that past times were better, only because those moments have already passed and we can not take them back. Even in classic literature books, the “nowadays”, it is somehow always worse than the “before”, like if he present had lost the charm of authenticity.
Perhaps I would do the same witth that night; to simply remember it as a happy moment with my riends while living abroad.
I got up to throw the now dry and flavorless chewing gum to a nearby trash can. It was far enough from the noise of laughs on my table. It hurted a little, I thought, to not feel as happy as they dis, when I had every reason to feel like them as well.
Then I stopped and stared at the view of the night of NYC, thirty floors up from the roaring streets of the city, as I rrealized that as long as I feelt disguised with myself, I could not bear with feeling at ease with me as well. That it might be one or the other, and I was too bussy trying to create a version of me I could live with, and laugh with.
And then I wondered, how would I remember tonight?
Because the memories I made here would be stained by vomit. Not the actual reddish brown barf, but the reason behind my need to do so. Despite the fact that I could not fully control it, my vomits were intentionate, delivarate. I did that on purpose, because I don’t know what else to do with myself when I do not feel okay whith who I am, or what I do. I can’t bear with my own self.
On top of everything, I could not understand why I kept on doing that, why I kept staining what could have been my own moments of happyness.
And then I wondered, would I erase the pain of this moment when I look back at it in a few years? Would I just remember my friends singing in a rooftop, or the acid taste of the vomit all over my mouth?
Realization came a moment after, when I made peace with the fact that we cannot choose how those moments stay with us, why we keep certain memories, how we keep them.
We just know that we do.
Marina More, 2022
Marina More 
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