• Am I allowed to hit the low? With a parade of red blood and broken glass when I arrive – battered and bruised and too gone to save. Curled into a ball on the bloody sheets – it never comes off, never goes away. We clean them over and over; clean everything but there’s always that bright red mess covering everything I can see. Tears slip down my face and I feel lost, as if everyone really has abandoned me. He left, he’s trying to fix himself in the worst way imaginable and he ... he’s just gone and I can’t get to him anymore.

    Then it all disappears. Your arm wrapped around me, your warm cheek against mine, our fingers intertwined as I try to make sense of it all and can’t. I lean back against you, trying to think but thoughts are excited and scrambled, moving too fast for even someone with the fastest reflexes to catch them. But it feels like healing ... and a little bit of hope.

    Hope that it’s all over now, that there’ll be no more bad spells and that life will go back to normal. But I know it’s not true. One person can’t fix everything for someone else, no matter how much they want to...

    At least you can make the pain go away, even just for a little while.

    But then you leave me again and I’m lost all over again, like a child without their parents or a puppy when he crawls under the fence and the adrenaline has worn off. I’m all alone, wandering the streets with a bottle in hand and a knife in my pocket. Again...

    But then my imagination runs away with me and I see myself in a hospital bed with you at my side, crying softly as you wish I hadn’t done it. You whisper frantically to me to wake up, our fingers entwined like they were that first time and a scream of mental anguish finally wrenches free and brings me back to reality.

    I kneel on the concrete, my head in my hands as I cry, wishing it would all go back to how it was. When life was simple...

    Then once again you appear with your arms wrapped around me and you whisper in my ear.

    “Simplicity is overrated.”