(This story was written for my friend, Danny Bland. The only honest sentiments I've made have you in them.)

             Allow these words to serve as evidence that I no longer care who it is that I take down with me.

    
    Sleep.

    oralackthereof.

    "...but only three hours of sleep," the funny little doctor in the white coat said as he scribbled on his prescription pad, "that will make any one crazy. How are you now? Thinking of hurting yourself?"
   
    Entertaining notions of killing oneself isn't really hurting oneself, is it? It's more like the end of a continuous, suffocating hurting. No one pill will fix it unless it is all of them.
   
    I didn't even fucking miss sleep.

    I hated the three hours that I was getting and the real-life nightmares that were no different than my waking hours with the exception that the dreams struck when I was vulnerable to them. Horrible dreams in which I was sobbing but couldn't breathe to get the tears out or screaming but the sound wasn't being emitted from my throat. The worst of them was when I was trying to inflict physical violence upon someone who had hurt me but drew no reaction from them-- not even annoyance-- and I knew then that I was helpless. I could not force anyone to care.

    My bed was pointless. There was no rest, no escape, no sex... but it was coated in months worth of dust, shed hair, dead skin and dried semen.

    It was the only scrapbook by which I had as evidence of the things that had happened.

    "I'm good. I don't want to hurt myself."

    The doctor tore the sheet from his pad and handed it to me.

    "This is for the really bad days-- and, trust me, there will be really bad days."

    I wanted to believe that it started there while I was seated on the crinkled wax paper underneath the glare of florescent lights-- but I knew better than that-- and it didn't.

    I wanted to believe that it started with my brother's accident and laying in my two-year-old nephew's room while he cuddled asleep into my side. I stared up into the still darkness waiting for my sister to come home from the hospital--to save me from an adulthood that, at twenty-nine, I was in no way prepared for.

    It didn't start there either.

    Nor did it start in the sweltering, sweaty heat of July in the only known recording studio without air conditioning as I struggled to learn albums worth of material. The bite of Mexican beer from a tin bucket lingered in my mouth as the guitarist looked on at me with concern and kept requesting,
   
    "Play it again."

    I didn't know a damn thing about the organ.

    But that wasn't enough to keep me from sleep.

    It could've been my parents. That would have made sense. There were frantic phone calls asking if I knew anything about the value of particular Fender guitars. Would I be interested in buying just such a guitar?
   
    "I wanted to give you first stab at it," my dad insisted. He tried to sound generous and cool.

    They were ill-gotten goods. These were no more guitars than they were drug money.

    I ignored the messages until they stopped coming and I didn't think to ask why they had stopped.

    Not even that had kept me from sleep.

    Not even that was the beginning.

    It didn't start because I was working two jobs and sixty hour weeks. It wasn't because despite the two jobs and sixty hour weeks-- I hadn't a cent with which to feed myself.

    It was not because that asshole from the Midwest called me and yelled at me for crying,

    "DO YOU KNOW WHY THIS KEEPS GETTING BAD, BONNIE?! BECAUSE YOU NEVER TELL ANYONE HOW FUCKING BAD IT IS!!!"

    If he was right about this much, he never would have known it. I quit telling him about anything at all-- even hello.

    And as much as I would like to think so, it did not start on the morning--that morning-- when I couldn't take in a lungful of air without excruciating pain.

   
    It started with the blonde boy.

    "I love your room," He awed as he looked around, "I never want to leave it."

    He helped himself to lighting the Catholic candles and smelling the vase of flowers. He took off his leather jacket and draped it from the back of the desk chair.

    I pointed out a picture of myself as a smudgy faced child that I kept affixed to the mirror.

    "That's me. I keep it there to remind myself that I shouldn't be mean to myself because I would never be mean to that little kid-- and I still am that little kid."
   
    He nodded, "That's a good idea."

    We sat on the cream-colored rug and despite it being May-- I shivered.

    "Are you cold?" He inquired.
   
    I wasn't cold. I was nervous.

    "I'm okay."
   
    He took his jacket from the back of the chair and covered my legs. He took off his gray knit cap and scratched at his scalp.

    "I like your hair," I complimented.
    "I've been thinking of cutting it."
    "Why?" This distressed me for some reason.
    "Because it's summer. I always cut it for summer. You should cut it for me. What are you doing next week?"
    "I won't cut it. I like it!"
    "If you don't cut it--I'll try to do it myself and it'll look terrible..."
    "... and then I'll stop talking to you."
    "I always wear this hat," he inspected it, "I don't know why."
    "It's an okay hat-- but you shouldn't cover your hair."
    "Doesn't matter. I'm still going to cut it."

    The hours stretched on like that. Splitting a six-pack with our eyes on the television screen. My shoulder bumped his and I apologized.

    "You don't have to apologize for touching me."
    I yawned.
    "Let me know when you're ready to kick me out."
    I gave him one more episode of the BBC comedy, rounded the time to two am and sent him away. He hugged me at the gate. It was only a hug.

    Within months the whole story would change.

    I spent summer, without my clothes, stretched out across his bed. My head dizzy with booze mixtures and hot skin that had been permeated with cigarette smoke. I pulled on his white t-shirt that I had salvaged from the floor and staggered across his bedroom-- tripping over the sweetest dog you ever met to the sound of a dreamy girl band flooding the darkness from the stereo. I hated girl bands. Almost all of them. It was a gimmick that oozed insincerity and sounded like a commercial for Apple computers.
    I was a woman in music so maybe I hated myself-- ah, no! Think of that picture on the mirror...
   
    Oh, the mirror! I flicked on the bathroom light and flinched under the harsh brightness. I studied myself in the mirror-- his mirror-- obscured by words that he wrote in dry ease marker. It was the most beautiful poetry that I had ever read and the most toxic sentiments that he had for me.
    Other girls he described as puzzle pieces or love walking out the door but for me-- for me-- he wrote,

    "Take it or leave it."
    That was what I was worth and I should have seen it then-- spelled out for me with the English alphabet.

    But I didn't.

    I only saw that I was looking ghoulish. Sleepless. Sickly with pale skin and cracked eyeliner.

    "What do you do?" His friends would ask me.

    I watched from a distance as he took tequila shots with a journalist. He leaned his tall, lean body down toward her and gave her a look that I tried to dismiss as something besides the obvious.

    "I'm in a band," I answered with a fake smile through red lipstick.

    "I'm not surprised," a friend said over the phone as I was in tears.

    I had just found out that the blonde boy had been fucking the girl that he shared a wall with. The same girl who was in the next room as we had sex on the bathroom floor after shows when he had taken too many pain killers and made declarations of love. I wanted to make him scream like he did on his records. This went on for hours. There were towels covered in my menstrual blood and nobody got off. The next morning he wouldn't even remember how we got home let alone that we had fucked.

    Somehow I came away from this situation feeling as though I had been the one who had done something wrong.

     "I mean, I know him," The friend continued, "I watched him hit on every girl at that wedding in July."


    I opened my eyes that morning in late September from something that someone, somewhere, might have called sleep but it was just my life played out like a horror film with my eyes closed.
   
    I was tired and my lungs would not fill with air.
   
    The blonde boy wasn't with me but wouldn't go away. The band had chucked me out. My parents had stopped calling because my father was in jail for identity theft and my mother was in a halfway house pretending to get clean...
    ...and. I. Could. Not. Sleep... and why could I not breathe? Why could I not breathe? Why could I not breathe?
    I wiped my oily face with my dirty hand and made my way to the liquor cabinet. I poured a whisky to the brim of the tumbler and took three of the pills to start. This wasn't going to be a bad day. This was going to be the first good day that I'd had in awhile. I wasn't ever going to feel like this again. There weren't going to be anymore bad days.

    I pulled out my notebook and pen.

    'For what it is worth-- I am sorry. I know there is shit to clean up that you aren't going to want to-- and it shouldn't be your problem. My problems should not have become all of your problems-- and it's selfish-- because you'll have to explain this to kids and think about it-- and my family.'

    My cell phone rang. It was on silent but from the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the black and white photograph of Lucien at age twenty-four. It stayed solid against the screen for a few moments then cut away.

    'I'm tired. I ran out of hope. If this is all that life is going to give me...'

    Lucien's picture came up again. I shook more pills into my hand from the bottle and pushed them past my lips.

    Before this, back when I was twenty, overdoses on pills and whisky and trips to the emergency room allowed me to come out feeling relatively clean. But maybe that was only Olympia Washington. Maybe that was only the smell of lavender oil and Nag Champa.

    'I know there is nothing wrong with me-- I'm healthy and fucking lucky...'
    This time I watched the still of Lucien. He was onstage and his tiny skeletal frame hunched over like the weight of the Fender Mustang was keeping him down. His Scratch Acid t-shirt was tucked into his jeans making him look like the squarest guy that you ever saw in your life. His hair, bleached blonde at the time, was just long enough to obscure his angular face.

    'Danny gets control of my writing...'

    The Lucien that I knew still recognized the twenty-four year old Lucien in the photograph but he didn't resemble him. Twenty-four year old Lucien was the greatest rock star that ever lived and was wrought with the sicknesses that he had bestowed upon himself.
    I had never met twenty-four-year-old Lucien.
    The Lucien that I knew claimed that, for this much, I was fortunate.
    The Lucien that I knew-- had left voicemail messages.

    I didn't bother listening to them. I tilted the prescription bottle and dumped the contents onto the bed spread-- counting what was left one by one.
   
    Was this enough?

    I felt drowsy.

    There was a swelling in my throat that was difficult to distinguish between vomit and sobbing.

    I rose from the bed to unsteady, aching legs. I pulled Levi's on and slid my feet into black Keds, then wrapped myself in my black peacoat.

    I fumbled for the door-- my vision was useful so long as I focused all of my energy on having only one eye opened.

    I staggered into the backyard in what felt like slow motion and hid myself amongst the evergreen trees. I laid down in the ferns on the cold, wet ground and released the swelling from my throat.
   
    It had been sobbing after all.