Childish Things
When I was a child, I kept a bottle of Gatorade Glacier Freeze on my bedside table. I would reach for it in the dead of night, and my thirst would be quenched by the soothing flavor of “blue.” I purchased them in packs of six, bound by those plastic rings you always see on turtle corpses. The well of Gatorade Glacier Freeze never ran dry.
My Life As A Series of Bottle of Gatorade Glacier Freeze. There was a half-full bottle in the cupholder of my Pontiac Sunfire as I drove myself to college, and there it sat for six weeks after. I broke the seal on a bottle and drank deep the night I awoke to a phone call where I’d learn my father had passed away. A wildly swinging legged knocked a bottle from my nightstand on the first night I spent with my wife, spilling Gatorade Glacier Freeze on my dorm room floor.
A metaphorical comparison between these two acts is one I refuse to draw. For I love that woman too much. I respect her too much, to compare our lovemaking to a busted bottle of Gatorade Glacier Freeze.
The night she moved in, there was no bottle of Gatorade Glacier Freeze on the bedside table. While I bathed, it had been replaced with a fresh glass of tepid, regular tap water. I drank from that glass well.
When I was a child, I drank sports drinks as a child, I understood basic nutrition as a child, I replenished electrolytes as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. I put away my bottles of Gatorade Glacier Freeze.