Poof!
To say that I remember my first blackout would be an oxymoron. But I do.
A blackout is what happens when someone is drinking, awake and conscious – but the drinker doesn’t remember anything later. A fragmentary blackout happens because so much alcohol is consumed, the brain’s hippocampus can’t transfer memories from short-term to long-term. So I would be walking around, talking to people, doing whatever I would normally do in a drunken stupor, but when I sobered up a little, I would have zero recollection of what I’d done.
I drank with a lot of college friends who had blackouts. Until it happened to me, though, I didn’t believe it was real. My friends would say, “What did I do last night?” And I would tell them, not believing they didn’t know. I thought it was a game so we could replay our fun evening.
But no.
The first time I lost a piece of my life was during a game of Uno.
During summer, I went back to college to visit friends who were staying on campus all summer. I was thrilled to be back on my safe (legal drinking age) stomping grounds, with no classes to get in the way of my drinking. I don’t remember where – or how long – I stayed.
But I remember being sprawled on the 50-yard line in our college football stadium under the stars, a beer in one hand, staring at the night sky and feeling like the entire world belonged to me.
Ah, youth.
And during the day, I played Uno for hours with my friends. There was some kind of drinking “rule” – like, everybody drank when someone discarded an 8 – so we were all pretty plastered. There are a lot of eights in Uno.
Then – poof! – suddenly I was in a bathroom stall, sitting on the toilet, staring at the floor and wondering if the tiles were actually swirling, or if the movement was in my imagination.
“Kirsten!” Someone banged on the door. “What are you doing in there?”
Apparently I’d been gone for some time. I don’t remember deciding to leave the game, or if the game was over when I left. I don’t remember needing a restroom. I don’t remember anything between sitting there playing cards and watching the floor tiles swirl unnervingly at my feet.
If it had only been a minute or two, it would still have been a scary thing – but the people knocking on the door made it worse.
“You’ve been gone half an hour!” they said. “We’ve been waiting for you to play cards!”
“There’s no way!” I said. “I just got here!”
They had no reason to lie about the amount of time I’d been gone. And I had no memory of that entire half-hour of my life. Did I pass out on the toilet? It seemed unlikely – if for no other reason than I’d have probably fallen off.
But I’d been doing something for half an hour, and no one – not a single soul – could tell me where I’d been or what I had been doing.
Briefly I considered that I could have been dead and no one would have known – including me. I had no memory of anything that happened during that time frame and I’m just lucky that I didn’t decide to take a little drive, jump in a swimming pool, or wander into oncoming traffic.
Instead I wandered into a toilet stall.
It was interesting to me that I had no memory – fascinating, even. After my first blackout, though, I started having them more frequently – which lasted for years. The first one is the only one I remember. After that, blackouts just became another price to pay.