Trusty Water Bottle

Seven years ago, when learning that my bad headaches may have been caused by dehydration, I thought it would be a good idea to keep a water bottle with me at all times to be sure I always drank enough water. It turns out I was wrong, and I still got headaches and the cause, in hindsight, was probably that I was quite underweight and not eating very much.

After a while, people started to notice that I always had a water bottle with me, so I thought it would be appropriate to give it a title. “Of course, I’ll always have my Trusty Water Bottle with me,” I’d say with a smile and people would either smile back or roll their eyes.

One friend, I remember, found the idea of a Trusty Water Bottle especially annoying and so grabbed it out of my hand one day, threw it on the floor and stamped on it over and over again until it was crushed.

“No, more of that water bottle,” he said, but I reached into the pocket of my jacket and pulled out another, identical one and explained that that one was now the Trusty Water Bottle. Because, of course, while it may not be physically the same bottle, it’s still the same to me.

As time went by, people began to associate me with my Trusty Water Bottle more and moreso. The reason for this? Well, I was a teenager at the time, and so were my friends. As such, they were just beginning to realise that they could have a lot of fun by drinking alcohol and getting drunk. That, however, was never really something I was especially interested in, so whenever I attended any of these drunken house parties, I’d just enjoy some water from the Trusty Water Bottle. I remember lending it to a certain friend more than a few times to help them regain sobriety as quickly as possible. Not drinking alcohol was considered unusual, and therefore the Trusty Water Bottle was an easy thing for people who found it unusual to focus on.

When I started this blog, I named it the Trusty Water Blog in reference to the Trusty Water Bottle. Shortly after that, I went off to university and new people I met there began remember me by the water bottle in the early days. One day, I was at a friend’s house, and there were two other people there. “Oh, you’ve got a water bottle with you,” said one of them.

“That’s the Trusty Water Bottle,” my friend and the other person said in unison, and that made me quite happy.

Attention is drawn to it less often these days, but it makes me very happy to look back and remember all the ways that my different friends have responded to it over the years. Really, I suppose, what I actually like thinking about is the different ways that my friends have responded to me. Now all of my friends are gone, but I still have the Trusty Water Bottle; sometimes it’s hard to imagine things from seven years ago have any real connection to the present day, but the Trusty Water Bottle, for me, represents a chain that ties together everything since I got it. It’s one of a few such ‘chains’ that I have (and I realise that sounds like a negative, but it’s not) and it is nice to feel connected to the past. Also, I am surprised that this is the first blog post on the Trusty Water Blog to be called Trusty Water Bottle!

(Don’t miss my latest article for SmartDatingUK!)

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