An Account of Sharing an Ambien with a Girl I Met One Week Prior at a Party
By Tao Lin
We went into her room ~6:55PM. She asked if I wanted wine and I said no. She asked again and I said no. I said “I brought the Ambien.” She said something about Tiger Woods and I felt confused and said “we should see if it’s okay with alcohol.” She typed “ambient” into Google. I said “no, that’s the music, delete the t, ambient music.” She laughed and typed “ambien and alcohol and klonopin and” and grinned and said “just kidding.” She deleted all but “ambien and alcohol.” The first result said not to combine Ambien and alcohol. Every result seemed to say that. She clicked the first result. It said not to combine Ambien and alcohol. She said she drank a lot so it was okay. We each swallowed half an Ambien. She googled “ambien sex tiger woods.” She clicked dlisted.com. It said something about an “Ambien sex haze.” I said “I want to be in an Ambien sex haze.” She said we should’ve each swallowed one Ambien. We each swallowed another half an Ambien. We sat on her full-size bed that filled most of the room. She drank wine. I touched her cat.
After an unknown amount of time I felt that my eyesight was impaired and that I seemed vaguely sleepy and not nervous. I moved on the bed staring calmly at her face or the walls. I lay against pillows. I asked if she could turn off the light. She turned off the light. I felt confused, to some degree, by everything—but in a delayed manner, in that I seemed to be repeatedly realizing that I felt confused, instead of feeling directly confused. We seemed to be watching a foreign movie off her computer. At some point, with a comprehension that I wasn’t experiencing time accurately, I noticed that the light was on. I lay on my back and we weakly held each other and—between moments of silently laying against each other, unmoving and sometimes maybe asleep—kissed in an idle, inattentive manner. A mixed CD of my favorite songs, playing at a medium volume, sometimes confused me because I was unable to recognize the songs and seemed to mostly be processing it as a "vaguely annoying" noise. I felt myself occasionally waking without remembering having been asleep. I was sometimes trying to remove her clothing with what felt like extreme difficulty, as if I were removing the glass from a glass bottle by “pawing” at the glass.
At one point I had an erection and it seemed like we were both trying to undo my belt and unbutton my jeans. I weakly imagined what would happen if my jeans were removed and heard her say “we just met” from what seemed like an enormous distance and felt that I was asleep, or dreaming, or something, while "knowing" I was moving and therefore not asleep. Some areas of my brain seemed to be thinking things in a deliberately obscured manner—to be private from other areas of my brain. At one point I expressed confusion at her outfit, referencing my inability to remove any of it, and she said something like “it’s just…a skirt…tights...” and didn't move as I continued to weakly "paw" at it. At one point I felt myself "suspecting," somewhat sarcastically, that she was wearing a corset. Throughout most of this I felt unsure or unaware—because it seemed irrelevant, I think—if my eyes were open or closed and if I was thinking about anything. At some point I said something like “isn’t your friend going to be here soon, shouldn’t we get ready” and we saw it was something like 8:40PM. It felt surprisingly easy to stand from the bed. I walked out of the room feeling alert.