“I wish you’d tell me when you’re not alright,” he muttered over the phone. His voice was tired, angry, terrified, and small. “I don’t like not knowing. I don’t like feeling cast out of your life.”

I sighed. My muscles were perpetually sore, my mind forever tired, my breath hard to find. My soul was crumbling, drifting, leaking from my heart like the blood from my veins. Brown-red outlines of faces lay crumpled in the wastebasket, sketch after sketch of desperate faces, silently screaming in pain and fear and hopelessness, drawn in ink that flowed so easily from my arms.

Every cell was mine. Every face was mine. Every hurt was mine.

Neither do I, I thought to myself. I could barely register my thoughts or feelings, rarely recognizing them as my own. There would be nights that I would look in the mirror, and not realize the person staring back at me was me. What had happened? What had I become? My face had smiled once upon a time. My eyes held a sparkle of life, of fascination with life. My skin once had a normal, healthy, human colour. What stared back now was just… tired. The colour was gone, sallow, pale white with a hint of yellow-green. Those sparkling eyes held the same sick greenishness, with eyelids that barely had the strength to stay open against the weight of the deep-cut rings of blue which pushed my cheeks down. Or maybe the frown pulled them down.

I was dying. Dead or dying. The only way I could tell I had a pulse was by wrapping a belt around my neck and feeling it beat furiously against the pressure, sending a rush of colour back into my cheeks and a shrill ringing in my ears. Holding it. Holding. Watching my reflection suffer, and smiling at her torture. As I smiled, so did she. I think, perhaps, she knew she deserved the hurt. Her smile was her acceptance… her smile was her thanks.

No, I didn’t like being cast out from my own life, either. I did not like being a stranger in my every day experience. I did not like waking up early every morning to cover the gashes and burns and burst capillaries before going to work each morning. I did not like having to pretend everything was fine as pie. I did not like the constant flood of concerned stares, the flurry of tongue clucks, or the remarks about how bad I had been looking lately. And I most definitely did not like the fact that I laughed it all off. “I’m fine,” I’d hear myself say. “Just tired. You know how busy life gets. It’s nothing that a good sleep can’t fix.”

Had I had any control over my body, I would have fallen to my knees and screamed for help. But whatever voice I had was gone. What little of my true self remained was held captive, caged by bars forged from excess. The monster was self-medicating, sustaining itself on copious amounts of caffeine, nicotine and diet pills, while dampening my influence with alcohol, and Schedule IIIs and IVs. “I’m fine,” I heard myself say through a tired grin. “Nothing sleep can’t fix.”

But it never did. I never slept long enough or well enough to trigger any sort of reset button.

I found my breath and grasped at a thought. Any thought. Coughing softly, I returned to the phone. “I would, but it’s not a problem if I’m not alone,” I explained. “I just don’t think about it when I’m with you.”

“I guess I should be flattered?” he joked.

“Yeah, I guess you could,” I said with the strongest smile I could muster, lips only twitching weakly against the weight of the anguish which filled my cheeks.

“Well,” he said, warming up his signature arrogance, “I’m glad to hear that.”

I sighed with relief.
“I’m glad you’re glad.”