Patrón Silver.

Just saying the name makes my sinuses clear up – that tequila was always the perfect cure for a runny nose which I, ahem, had a lot of during that time. But it also makes something else happen, nothing to do with congestion and everything to do with memory.

This was 2003. I was living with Mona in a condo overlooking the ocean, and we had this ritual. Every Friday, we’d drive down to the store and buy a bottle of Patrón. Sometimes two, if we were feeling particularly alive.

We had money then. Not rich money, but enough money to not have to work or do anything we didn’t want to do, for a little while. Enough to just be in love and enjoy life. Mona had come into some money, and I’d sold a screenplay that would never get made but paid like it might. “This won’t last forever,” she’d say, holding up the bottle, “let’s drink it like it will.”

The bottle would catch the light from our ocean-facing windows, that silver liquid looking like liquid moonlight, like bottled starlight, like something you might find if you cracked open the night sky and let it pour into a glass. And when we drank it – always neat, always slowly, always with the kind of ceremony that made our beachfront condo feel like a palace – strange things would happen.

Not drunk things. Magic things.

I swear to God, that condo would get bigger when we drank Patrón. The walls would stretch, the ceiling would lift, and suddenly we had room to dance. Mona would put on some music and we’d move around that space like we had a ballroom, like the laws of physics bent themselves around the silver fire in our bellies.

And the colors. Jesus, the colors that would bloom from that bottle. We’d be sitting on our king-sized bed – we’d finally bought real furniture, figured we might as well live like adults while we could afford to – and the tequila would hit our bloodstreams and suddenly the white walls were painted with auroras. Greens and blues and purples that had no business existing in a beachfront condo.

“Do you see that?” Mona would whisper, pointing at the patterns of light dancing across our ceiling.

“I see everything,” I’d whisper back, and I meant it. The Patrón showed us things. Made us see things. Not hallucinations – something realer than that. Like it stripped away the filters that normally keep you from seeing the magic that’s always there, hiding in plain sight.

We’d make love on that mattress surrounded by impossible colors, tasting silver lightning on each other’s lips, and afterwards the room would hum with something that wasn’t quite music but wasn’t quite silence either. Like the universe was purring. Like we’d found the frequency that everything vibrates to when nobody’s listening.

Mona was an artist too- the kind that believes art can change the world – and when she danced after we’d shared a bottle of Patrón, her feet wouldn’t quite touch the ground. I’m not speaking metaphorically here. I watched her floating three inches above our scratched hardwood floor, moving to rhythms that existed somewhere between the music and the heartbeat of the ocean outside our window.

“You’re flying,” I’d tell her.

“We’re all flying,” she’d say. “We just don’t know it.”

We’d sit on our balcony with shots of that silver magic, watching the ocean stretch out below us like liquid mercury, like a living thing breathing light. And sometimes – I swear this is true – we could see the dreams rising from other windows along the beach. Actual dreams, colored like smoke and shaped like the things people wished for in the dark.

“When we make it,” Mona would say, and the words would shimmer in the air between us like heat waves, “we’ll have a house where we can see both the ocean and the mountains.”

“When we make it,” I’d say, watching my words take flight like silver birds, “we’ll drink Patrón every night.”

“When we make it,” we’d say together, and the phrase would hang in the air above the water like a promise the universe was actually listening to.

We thought we were playing at being adults, but looking back, I think we were actually playing at being gods. The Patrón gave us that kind of confidence, that kind of power. Like we could reshape reality just by wanting it badly enough, just by drinking deep enough from the bottle that held liquid starlight.

The magic was real. I know how that sounds, but it was. The room really did get bigger. Mona really did dance on air. The colors really did paint themselves across our walls. The dreams really did rise from the windows of the sleeping beachfront like prayers made visible.

But magic, like everything else good in this world, doesn’t last.

The tsunami was building even then, of course. We just couldn’t see it through the aurora that surrounded us every Friday night. The money was running out faster than we’d calculated. My screenplay money was gone, and the next one wasn’t selling. Mona’s money had seemed infinite when we started, but infinity has a way of becoming finite when you’re not paying attention to the math.

The fights started small, but they grew in the spaces between the magic. Whether we should start looking for real jobs. Whether this whole period had been a beautiful mistake. Whether we should let go of the condo and move somewhere cheaper. The Patrón started tasting less like possibility and more like denial. Less like alchemy and more like expensive procrastination.

The magic began to fade. The walls stopped expanding. Mona’s feet started touching the ground when she danced. The colors dulled to their normal, depressing shades. The dreams stopped rising from the windows of other condos, or maybe we just stopped being able to see them.

She left on a Tuesday in October, taking her ability to fly and half a bottle of Patrón. Left me with the lease I could no longer afford, the furniture we’d bought in better times, and the sudden understanding that magic doesn’t pay rent. That you can’t eat starlight. That no matter how silver the tequila or how real the dreams, money runs out and the universe keeps its own books.

I finished that half bottle sitting on the balcony alone, watching the ocean that used to breathe light. It tasted the same, but nothing happened. No colors, no expansion, no dreams rising like smoke from sleeping windows. Just expensive tequila in a world that had suddenly remembered how to follow the laws of physics.

I never drank Patrón again after that. Not because I couldn’t afford it – though I couldn’t – but because I was afraid. Afraid it wouldn’t work anymore. Afraid the magic was gone forever. Afraid that what I’d experienced was just the desperation of two kids trying to make poverty feel like adventure.

But sometimes, late at night when I’m drinking something that doesn’t cost sixty dollars and doesn’t promise anything more than a hangover, I wonder if the magic is still out there. If other young couples are sitting in their beachfront condos, sharing bottles of silver lightning, living off easy money, watching their walls expand and their dreams take flight.

I hope they are. I hope they’re drinking deep and seeing colors and floating three inches above their hardwood floors. I hope they think the money will last forever and that love is all you need and that the universe is listening to their silver-tongued promises.

Because here’s the truth about Patrón and magic and being young enough to believe in impossible things: it doesn’t matter if it was real or not. What matters is that for a while, we lived in a world where walls could stretch and people could fly and dreams were visible in the night sky. Where we had enough money to not have to work or do anything we didn’t want to do, and we spent it all on love and tequila and the kind of freedom that only comes when you don’t have to think about tomorrow.

What matters is that we had that time when we didn’t know any better. When we thought magic came in bottles and could be shared and would last forever. When we thought money was infinite and love was permanent and the ocean would always be there to catch our dreams when they fell.

Before we learned that the only thing that lasts forever is the memory of when we thought everything would.

Carlos Bukowski writes about magic, memory, and the things we drink to remember from his apartment in Hollywood. He still gets a clear nose when he thinks about tequila, but the colors never came back.