Migraine breakfast, narco lunch, bathwater dinner and I'll try again tomorrow.

Well it's full speed baby
In the wrong direction
There's a few more bruises
If that's the way
You insist on heading

Please be honest Mary Jane
Are you happy
Please don't censor your tears

You're the sweet crusader
And you're on your way
You're the last great innocent
And that's why I love you

Softer music on the stereo this morning while I eat a banana and drink coffee, an ice-pack on the back of my neck and another on my forehead. Ben sits with me. I'm maxed out on medication and loath to top up in case I wind up with the cycling rebound pain I get when I take too much too soon. If I were less afraid of everything or less perfect in my personal morality I would snort some coke off the counter and call it a day, sleeping until early in the week as the world reduced itself to undone chores, post-binge filth piling up around me like a photoshoot from VICE. Fake as fuck and yet designed to make everyone currently sober wish they could just let go of their white-knuckle grip on life for five fucking seconds. Only life isn't a magazine, life has teeth and those teeth are sharp if you fall behind long enough for it to catch you and eat you slowly, one limb at a time.

This might be Ben's fault. Reformed junkies addicts rockstars have trouble sleeping and so he wakes me often in the hours where my sleep is deepest. He has to reach way down and fish around in the dark to find me and when he does my head breaks the seal, pain flooding into my skull. He feels bad but he also can't help himself sometimes. Rough as he can be, big as he is, he never leaves marks and so I don't think I mind, I just can't reconcile it with this. This pain. This day wasted on gingerly breathing, feeling my way around for oxygen, functional and yet not functioning. He's suggested we have a blisteringly hot bubble bath when we're done our coffee. That helps a lot, actually. Maybe I can relax enough to fall asleep again later if I can convince Ben and Loch to have a Saturday-nap.

Maybe it will go away. Like Jake. Like Cole. Like the Devil because I pushed back and I'm suddenly glad for these little lightning flashes of courage mixed with exasperation, everything colored with my endless selective integrity that actually makes me laugh even as I'm ashamed of myself most of the time. The keening that never ends inside my brain and seems to get loose all the time anyway, that noise that seeks out affection like a homing beacon, landing on the first savior it sees.

So coke would be better by far. Maybe in one of those edgy magazine photo shoots.

 I don't even recognize myself without sleep any more.

You're still you, Ben confirms upstairs as I look in the mirror and I turn to look at him, putting my back to my own face, which sounds painful in it's own right but it's kind of a relief.

How do you know? 

Because you're always inside out and you make no effort to hide that. Why don't you stay put while I go run the bath? Sit quietly with the ice pack. I'll come get you when it's ready.