So you’ve woken up on a cold tiled floor, with the puddle of sick beside you becoming all the more obvious most notably for the fact it missed the safe zone of a toilet. Your clothes smell like cigarette smoke even though you don’t smoke. Well, you might have last night. You’re covered in sand, cuts and bruises even though you’ve no recollection of being anywhere near a beach. Or falling near the beach. You’ve lost your top. Disaster. You were quite fond of that top. You try to stand up but give up miserably when the higher ground makes you dizzy.

So you end up sitting on the ground, with the wall the only source of comfort for your now sunburned back.

As you look around, you realise you’ve lost your friends and you’re outside the wrong apartment. Shit. You’re in the wrong complex altogether. You actually stayed here three years ago. In your drunken stupor, your homing instinct brought you home. It just brought you to the wrong home. So you pick yourself up once more, fighting through the dizziness that stopped you short the last time. You smell people cooking but the thoughts of food make you feel sick. You successfully navigate your way to the main strip and begin the pilgrimage to where you’re meant to be staying. This is where you hope to find your friends. They’ll probably be fully clothed. Which automatically means your night must have been better than theirs. Families on the strip give you funny looks because you’re cut to pieces and you’re bare chested. But you couldn’t care less.

You finally reach the apartment. You rule out the chance that you’ve a key by fumbling around in your flowery shorts and finding nothing but a solitary five euro note amongst wads of unnecessary concessions. So you begin loudly rapping on the door. When there’s no answer after roughly thirty seconds, you begin to pound your fist on the window. One of your mates eventually answers. “Alright mate.” No time for pleasantries. You need that cold embrace that only a tiled kitchen floor can give. You collapse in a heap on the ground and one of your mates is kind enough to throw a pillow your way.

A few hours later, you wake to the sound of the stereo playing a song that you don’t like. Lads on holiday together never agree on the music to be played. Your friends are no different. You look up and see your friend drinking a can of Budweiser. Not for you. No way. Not yet, anyway. There’s two leftover slices of pizza on the table. You think you can see some pepperoni on them. “You eating that?” is what you mumble. When you get the nod to munch away, the pizza is possibly the best thing you’ve ever eaten. The lads ask you where you were, but all you can give is a helpless shrug of the shoulders. They understand.