"Is it over yet?" you asked, slowly pulling your hands back for a peek.

"Not just yet", I said softly, the blood still running down our leg. And I wished I could still feel it, the way I could as a child. The numbness I'd sought for so long, giving up every ounce of faith that I had once desperately grasped for, has become a deeper emptiness than I'd known was possible, and the source of a perpetual panic attack.

"It doesn't hurt", I said with a tinge of disappointment that was more reassuring to you than it would ever be for me.

"What's wrong?" the question that was perpetually on your lips, and I wished for once that your concern wasn't such an annoyance. But at least, for once, it wasn't without reason.

Forever isn't something that one can manifest into some physical form, and all the blood in the world only demonstrates that impossibility. And yet that's a promise that you go to bed every night hoping for. It used to be so easy, promising you something that I seemed readily capable of giving. But everything has been an impossibility lately, I'm leaving long before you, a fact that you will never accept. And I have nothing to leave you.

"The difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer" (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray).

Woke up on the living room floor again to the smell of vomit and dog piss and Rayne licking my face as I tried to open my eyes. The sunlight streaming into the room exasperating my already pounding head. Images of pills and cigarettes and alcohol and razorblades and sex flashed fleetingly through my memory of another dream fading away, or of another bad night worthy of forgetting; they've become one-and-the-same.

She was gone again.

I was already three hours late. Trying desperately to find the strength to get up, and despite the blackout I somehow knew that I shouldn't still be here. Empty pill and liquor bottles everywhere. Vomit near the garbage can, near the sofa, near the TV. Every limb trembled.

And I wished she was here.

The way she would have called work for me, taken me into the shower and washed me, cleaned up the messes made, kept my glass of water full and cold, helped me into my bed and sat next to me in devotion despite her resentment, running her hands through my hair, kissing my forehead, silently, lovingly.

I was three-and-a-half hours late when I opened my eyes again. I felt a cigarette burn in the carpet near my hand, and I suddenly became aware of a burning sensation in my back. I reached back and could feel out the scabbed letters of her name. More images vaporizing as I desperately tried to grasp onto them before they vanished all-together.

It was nearly 1:00pm by the time I completed my morning routine at work, barely conscious, my body still trembled violently. And I realized that I don't know how to make this stop and I'm quickly running out of time to figure it out.

The dog whined quietly as the alarm clock screamed relentlessly stirring me from my sleep. I rolled over on the bed to find that you were gone again.... or more appropriately, to find that I was alone again. My mind grasped to solidify scenes that flash from the night before; like dreams that escape from your grip as you struggle to hold onto them just long enough to remember. I pulled your pillow over to me and buried my face in it, inhaling the final remnants of you, filling my body with every breath as I fought to keep myself from falling back to sleep.

I stirred from my sleep again to the dogs anxiously barking. The alarm had silenced itself in exhaustion of trying to wake that which may as well have been dead. With every ounce of strength I could muster I sat up in the bed. A single cigarette was laying on the dresser beside a clean ashtray. The room spun as I began to smoke, and I realized that my contacts were still in, which meant that I didn't even make it to bed on my own. And just as I remembered your promise that you would be here when I woke up, my phone began to ring.

"Good morning Jaydon! I'm sorry I didn't call you back last night!" Christy said in a voice that was way too cheery for this early in the morning.
"Idlanevarimbarcaliyi", even I didn't have any idea what I was trying to say.
"Another good night I take it?"
"Idon'tknow,verybadreactionfromnewmedicationIthink" I rubbed my eyes obsessively
"Well I didn't mean to wake you, have a great day Jaydon!"
"Yeahthanks,youtooChristy" I found myself rubbing my entire face now, trying to coax out a more aware level of consciousness like some kind of fucking genie.

I crushed out my cigarette in the ash tray, unflinchingly burning my my finger in the process. I got up out of bed and put on the pair of jeans laying beside it, and began to stumble my way to the bathroom. I stepped on a piece of a broken glass on the floor shouting some some obscenity as I continued to limp unwaveringly to the bathroom where I promptly emptied the nothing in my stomach before removing the glass from my foot.

And I knew it was going to be one of those days......