Lessons of Cough Syrup

In fighting this cold I have, the one that has insisted on camping out in my lungs and sinuses for the past week, I have taken to dosing myself up on Mucinex Nightime Cold and Flu immediately before I climb into bed.  When fighting colds, I almost always rely on medicine that comes in the form of a pill and until this most recent purchase of PM liquid (bought with hope and prayers it would just knock me out for the night) I can promise you that it has been years and years since I last took any sort of medicinal liquid anything.  Seriously, I feel like I was 12 or so the last time I forced myself to swallow that awful thick tasting syrupy stuff known as cough medicine.  On Saturday night, when I poured out my first round of the stuff, I had a simple, yet eye opening observation.  It is far easier to down the suggested 20 ml dosage when one has done a shot or two in their life.

(Seriously. As a kid, I sort of remember sipping the awful stuff.  Now it's just...down the hatch!)

Last night, as I poured out another round of the dark blue stuff before bed, a memory came back to me, from one of my very first nights as a freshman at college; way, way back in early September about a hundred years ago.  My brand new roommate and I, both of us homesick and lost without one another, were invited to tag along with a floor mate on a Friday night.  There was a rumor of some house party we were going to get in to on Ashford Street. (Aside - this is what every BU freshman ever is told the very first weekend they arrive on campus.  Obviously, the BUPD are aware of this...and the likelihood of anyone getting into any party is slim to none.  If one does get in, the party is broken up in approximately four minutes and thirty seconds.  This means freshman spend the evening simply walking up and down Ashford Street just hoping for any invitation to any party anywhere until they finally give up and make their way back to their dorm rooms.  It should be known too that Ashford Street is likely the dumpiest, most disgusting street in all of greater Boston, filled with collapsing houses rented out to upper BU classmen. You could not pay me enough to live there.)

Anyway, there I was, at age seventeen, heading to another stranger's room as a group of girls gathered together to head out on our first ever Friday night in college.  One of the girls in the group pulled out a bottle of cough syrup and started chugging it as we walked out of the dorms.  In my complete and utter innocence, I asked her, in what I hoped would be seen as a friendly, empathetic, and bonding tone, if she was sick.

"Uh..." She just started at me, waiting a beat.  I felt my cheeks flush red, not even sure what I should be embarrassed about.
"I'm doing it for the alcohol." she stated, clearly frustrated by my naivety.
  
I remember thinking to myself at the time, as Dorthy would say, that suddenly I wasn't in Kansas anymore.  I missed my high school friends and my family so intensely in that moment in the lobby of that old dorm building I would have given almost anything to be back in New Jersey with them. I also realized that things were changing now, that they would never again be the same.  In a way maybe, I was quickly and quietly mourning the loss of our pure, collective innocence.  

Thinking back on that moment now, it's so obvious to me why that random girl was sucking down the cough syrup and so sweetly surprising that I really hadn't a clue at that time.  The world gets so much larger when we leave home for the first time doesn't it?  I'm so grateful for the ways in which my experiences and knowledge has grown, expanded, and been shaped in the years since I moved away.  And yet, I am so thankful too for the years that were shrouded in a general state of innocence and simplicity.  For I have always thought that adulthood is a long and winding journey and childhood is so very, very brief.