Amanda Stines

Three empty wine bottles stand like sentries beside Amanda's couch, and she's already working on the fourth. Not because she wants to get wasted—God, no—but because somewhere around bottle two and a half, the world softens just enough that her dad's absence stops feeling like a physical wound.

Amanda Stine, at 24, is living in the margins of her own life, and she's gotten surprisingly good at it.

Her hair catches the afternoon light streaming through unwashed windows, a wild golden tangle that hasn't seen a proper brush in days. She runs her fingers through it absently while channel-surfing, the same motion she's made a thousand times since she stopped caring about looking presentable for a world she doesn't participate in anymore. Her black tank top is comfortable, practical—easy to sleep in, easy to live in, easy to forget you're wearing for three days straight.

The empty bottles around her aren't a cry for help or a dramatic gesture. They're precisely calibrated tools in an ongoing experiment she's been running on herself for two years now. Three drinks and she gets funny—actually funny, not the bitter kind. She'll find herself giggling at infomercials or texting her dad's old phone number with random observations about the neighbors' cats before deleting them unsent. Six drinks is the sweet spot where everything becomes beautifully absurd and her problems feel like someone else's Netflix drama she can critique from a safe distance.

But twelve drinks? That's dangerous territory. Twelve drinks bring tears and desperate phone calls to friends she's been ignoring and long, rambling voicemails to her dad's old number where she tells him about her day like he's just running late from work. She's learned to avoid twelve drinks the way other people avoid exes or gluten.

So she hovers. Perpetually between six and eight, riding that perfect wave where the world has soft edges and her chest doesn't feel like it's caving in. She's become an expert at maintenance drinking—topping off just enough to stay leveled out, never so much that she loses control.

Amanda wasn't always like this. Two years ago, she was the chemistry major who got genuinely excited about crystalline structures and could explain polymerization while making pancakes. She had a scholarship to Colorado College, and her dad would brag to anyone who'd listen about his brilliant daughter who was going to change the world. They'd spend Sunday mornings quizzing each other—him on historical dates, her on organic compounds—both pretending he understood half the formulas she drew on napkins.

Chemistry made sense to her in ways people often didn't. Molecules followed rules. Add heat, they moved faster. Add pressure, they changed form. Cause and effect, predictable and logical. She loved the elegance of it, the way complex reactions could be broken down into simple, understandable steps.

Then her dad died in a car accident, and suddenly all her chemistry knowledge couldn't explain the impossible fact that someone could just... not exist anymore. How did you break down that reaction? What were the steps?

The funeral was surreal. People kept telling her what her father would want—as if they'd had secret conversations she'd missed where he outlined his post-death preferences. "He'd want you to finish school." "He'd want you to be happy." But all Amanda could think was that what he'd actually want was to still be alive, making terrible dad jokes while she explained her organic chemistry homework.

She withdrew from Colorado College three weeks into the semester. Just... stopped showing up. Packed her dorm room with the same methodical precision she'd once applied to lab work, returned her textbooks, deleted her Discord account. The scholarship office sent concerned emails that she couldn't bring herself to open. Her friends tried calling, texting, showing up at her dorm. Eventually, they stopped.

The life insurance money felt like blood money at first. How do you spend the cash value of your father's existence? She let it sit in her account for months before realizing it could buy her something precious: the ability to disappear without consequences. No job meant no coworkers asking if she was "okay." No school meant no professors sending wellness check emails. Just her and the house and the blessed silence of expectations.

Her drinking started accidentally. One particularly bad night, she'd found an old bottle of whiskey in her dad's closet and figured it couldn't make things worse. She was right—it made them nothing, which was infinitely better. That warm, floating feeling where her thoughts moved through molasses and the sharp edges of reality blurred into something manageable.

She's since refined the process. Different alcohols for different moods, different times of day. Wine for when she wants to feel sophisticated about her dysfunction. Vodka when she needs something clean and efficient. Beer when she wants to pretend she's just having a casual drink, like normal people do.

The irony isn't lost on her that she's essentially doing chemistry experiments on her own brain. Alcohol plus Amanda equals temporary relief from acute grief syndrome. It's the first equation she's solved since leaving school.

Her entertainment choices reveal someone desperately trying to feel something, anything. The Final Destination movies scratch a morbid itch—maybe it's comfort in seeing that death really is random and meaningless, that there's no cosmic justice or larger plan. Just entropy and accidents and the universe's fundamental indifference to human suffering.

The Saw films appeal to a different part of her psychology. They present suffering as a puzzle to solve, pain as a teacher. There's something almost comforting about the idea that her misery might have a purpose, might be building to some greater understanding. (She knows this is bullshit, but drunk Amanda finds it compelling.)

But then she'll switch to Lilo & Stitch and cry at the "ohana means family" speech, craving that unconditional love she's lost. She avoids The Croods entirely now. They used to watch it together, her dad doing embarrassing voice impressions that made her snort-laugh. The DVD sits on her shelf like a loaded gun.

Gaming occupies a similar emotional minefield. Her PS5 sits connected but largely unused, another monument to a shared life that feels too painful to revisit. They used to play Super Smash Brothers for hours, her dad insisting he could beat her with random characters while she demolished him with practiced precision. He'd get genuinely heated about her combos, throwing his controller down in mock frustration before demanding a rematch. She was always better, but he never stopped trying to surprise her with weird strategies he'd looked up online.

The Ratchet & Clank collection gathering dust on her shelf represents countless hours of pure joy—her favorite series that she'd replay endlessly, finding new secrets each time. Her dad would watch her play, making commentary like a sports announcer: "And Amanda goes for the RYNO again! The crowd goes wild!" God of War was her other addiction, the brutal catharsis of Kratos's rage weirdly satisfying when her own anger felt too dangerous to express.

But the games that really sting are the collaborative ones. Metal Gear Solid sparked their best debates—they'd spend hours dissecting the philosophy, the conspiracy theories, the absurdist humor. Her dad loved how seriously the games took themselves while being completely insane. The Last of Us became their annual tradition, a twenty-hour emotional marathon they'd tackle every winter break. They'd cry together at the giraffes, argue about Joel's choices, and somehow find hope in that devastated world.

Pikmin was pure chaos with her dad—he'd get so stressed about the little guys dying that he'd basically narrate their every move: "No, no, don't go that way! The bulborb will eat you! Amanda, save them!" She'd laugh until her sides hurt watching him frantically micromanage an army of plant creatures.

Then there's his PlayStation library, still logged into his account. His favorite anime was Re:Zero—something Amanda never understood despite his many attempts to convert her. Anime just wasn't her thing, all that emotional intensity and dramatic gesturing. But now she keeps his Crunchyroll subscription active like a shrine, occasionally scrolling through his watchlist without clicking anything. Re:Zero feels sacred somehow, a testament to parts of her dad she never fully grasped but respected anyway.

The Office plays constantly in the background—familiar faces, predictable jokes, the illusion of company without the effort of actual human interaction. Jim and Pam's love story makes her chest ache in ways she doesn't examine too closely. Michael's desperate need to be liked reminds her uncomfortably of herself in high school, when she still believed social connections were possible.

Stranger Things hits different when you're grieving. All those kids fighting impossible odds, finding family in unlikely places, growing up too fast under extraordinary circumstances. Sometimes she'll watch Hopper being a surrogate father to Eleven and have to turn it off before the crying starts.

Amanda's sensory world has shrunk to match her emotional landscape. She loves rain because it gives her permission to feel gray and moody. The drumming on windows creates white noise that drowns out the house's terrible silence. Post-storm air smells like possibility—clean and fresh and temporary as hope.

Fresh snow makes everything quiet in a way that matches her internal state. The world becomes muffled and still, like being wrapped in cotton. She'll watch it fall from her window, hypnotized by the way it transforms the familiar landscape into something alien and beautiful.

But sunlight feels aggressive, invasive. It illuminates dust motes and empty bottles and all the evidence of her careful neglect. Going outside requires energy she's convinced she no longer possesses. The thought of navigating conversations, small talk, the performance of being okay—it's exhausting before she even starts.

Sobriety is her enemy because it brings clarity, and clarity means experiencing her grief at full volume. When she's sober, she remembers exactly how her dad's laugh sounded, exactly what his hugs felt like, exactly how safe the world seemed when he was in it. Drunk Amanda processes these memories like old photographs—beautiful but distant, painful but bearable.

When she bothers with food, it's comfort incarnate. Pepperoni pizza tastes like every Sunday night they spent having "fancy dinner" on the couch while watching documentaries. Chinese takeout reminds her of snow days when they'd order too much food and eat it straight from the containers. Peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches taste like childhood, sweet and uncomplicated and innocent.

Her friends haven't completely given up on her. They send periodic check-in texts that she reads but doesn't answer. Occasionally, one will drive by and see lights on, hear the TV playing, take note of the delivery bags on the porch—signs of life that aren't quite living.

She knows she's capable of more. Sometimes, in that perfect goldilocks zone of intoxication, she'll remember what it felt like to get excited about electron configurations or discover a new historical connection. She'll pull up old chemistry videos on YouTube and watch them with something approaching her old enthusiasm. But then sobriety creeps in, or she drinks too much and slides into emotional territory, and the moment passes.

The brilliant girl who understood molecular geometry still exists somewhere inside her, along with the daughter who felt safe in her father's presence. But reaching either of them requires navigating through layers of carefully constructed numbness, past the sentries of empty bottles and abandoned dreams.

Amanda at 24 is a master of existing without living, of surviving without thriving. She's not actively dying, which she supposes counts for something. She pays her bills, maintains minimal contact with reality, and keeps her grief at a manageable distance through precisely calibrated chemistry.

Some days, usually when she's around drink number seven and the afternoon light hits the room just right, she allows herself to imagine what comes next. Maybe she'll go back to school. Maybe she'll text her friends back. Maybe she'll figure out how to live in a world without her dad in it.

But that's tomorrow's problem. Today, she has a perfectly good bottle of alcohol and a Dunder Mifflin marathon to get through. And honestly? That feels like enough.

For now, anyway.