I was forty-five the year I started drinking gin. It’s not a pretty story and I don’t come off smelling like a rose, but it’s time to tell it. With a story like this, gin is the only thing astringent enough to clean the dirt from my mouth. Gin is snappy and crisp and washes away my sins, at least for the night. I love everything about gin, but maybe that’s because my love affair with it is new. The smell of it is a cold wintry tang in the nose; the look of it is hard and clear like liquid diamonds and that’s sort of deceptive because the taste of it is smooth and sweet yet sharp too like a beautiful woman with a knife. Gin slides down my throat like an ice snake. It’s bitter and oily, wavering in the glass like a silver mirror, and when it is a mirror is when I drink most. I’ll take it any way-neat, a shot, on the rocks, in a martini, in a Tom Collins or a fizz, with stupid fruit draped all over the glass, I don’t care. But my favorite way to drink it is with tonic because it reminds me of Her. I got the idea that gin is a disinfectant like hydrogen peroxide and if I drink enough, it will boil out the infection, which is this story I must tell.

     I found I’m a woman of excesses. I love cigarettes, I love gin, I love women and I love winning, all to a fault. I was born for trouble without knowing it and that is the worst kind. Suddenly, I’ve found that sometimes, a woman must drink alone.

     So I was forty-five the year I started drinking gin. It all started one day with a call from my ex.