Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You

I can't drink Tanqueray anymore without thinking of you. Sometimes I sit in Upper East Side bars, the beautiful faces of strangers lit by candlelight and the false promises of a Saturday night in the city, and I catch a glimpse of it, the dark green glinting glass. That bottle that we shared. It was an Indian summer and we were sitting next to the river, you and I and Tanqueray. I couldn't look at you or the fire in your eyes. Your eyes that held mine, one second too long. They were green like the glass of that iconic bottle, an impossible color to be honest but we were full of impossibilities. We were sixteen and we thought we knew everything. I can't drink Tanqueray without feeling your hands in my hair, our clothes smelling of smoke and our kisses full of juniper and coriander, angelica and liquorice. We drank the whole bottle that night, passing it back and forth, each sip adding to the intimacy of it all. Imagining your lips pressed on mine and not the neck of that bottle. I can't drink Tanqueray without thinking of our high school hallways, red and gold, pep rallys, Dashboard Confessional and AP exams. Nobody here can live forever, quiet in the grasp of dusk and summer. And just like that graduation came and we shook hands and left illegible letters in each other's yearbooks. What you wrote to me, I've never read. It's there for the day when I will finally drink Tanqueray again and smile and remember what it was like to be sixteen and in love with the world at our feet, when we knew everything and nothing.

Note: Loosely inspired by the song, Tequila, by Dan + Shay, listen here.

​For a bite-size snack of make-believe romance, read these short stories: 
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily