black sheep

This is the dragon, the Maeshowe Dragon, that's cast in silver on my grandad's ring, that I wear around my neck.

Maybe if he never knew I came to university, he'll never know that I'm failing. I don't want him to see me lying, or fucking my life up like this. I don't want anyone to but, see, you can't lie to the dead. Because they know, and all apologies can't shield the truth from the people with arial view.

But who lied first?

I'm drunk on my own right now, but who drank first? Who fucked up first? Who let down the team? Who isolated himself long before I did, who made this path that I'm walking?

I think maybe you know a thing or two about the darkness, think maybe you understand what that feels like.

You and I, you selfish bastard, think we were two fucking peas in a pod. And you could've known that, I could have fucking told you that if you'd called. If you'd even called.

Who should I call? Which member of the clan would I let down if I left today? See I don't have eighty years of wrongs to right, I barely have two decades and that alone hurts so bad I don't even know how you stood.

With eighty fucking years on your shoulders, how did you stand?

I'm nineteen. I can barely even lie down right.

I won't stop this til I have no one left. I won't stop til I have nothing. I will destroy myself and as many else as I can before I sleep, just like you. I breathe for any little thing I can grasp of your long existence, like scraps from a table because you never called.

I hear your voice from ten years ago, I hear your voice reading me stories because it's the only time we spoke. I smell your scent on my pillow from that time you fell asleep because it's the closest we ever sat. I feel your hands on my wrists as I danced on your shoes because that sometimes feels like the only time I've smiled.

You're dead, so tell me, what does it feel like to be free? How does it feel to not be eating yourself from the inside? How does it feel not to hurt anymore?

They say that suicides go to hell, but they never mentioned you. They mention murderers and thiefs but on the subject of absenteeism go strangely silent. Perhaps if I died, you and I in all our heathen joy would find each other.

Perhaps you could explain.

I'm in arrears, apparently, with my lost job and failed degree and tendency to both spend and drink my pain - no one ever said that scars would heal but money gone is gone - I can't even think straight. I can't even smoke right.

Yesterday I went home with a guy from one of my classes and got so stoned that I kept falling asleep on the way back. I spoke to people I didn't know, saw old friends in strangers' faces. I saw you. I saw demons; I saw you.

Funny how, when you're fucked, the nearest, strongest voice is the worst, and it sounds a lot like God's. God, who used to tell me to keep my legs shut and dump this guy or that guy, to not think or dream or feel or taste or love or live and promised me peace in return for brainwashing myself - yesterday he told me to run out into traffic.

Couldn't be God, you say, but if he sounds the same and dials the same number to get into my head then who else can it be? Maybe someone stole the poor bastard's mobile.

So I get home and play my favourite songs and tell myself that they remind me of times gone by - there is no greater misery than to remember in sorrow a time when we were happy - except perhaps remembering that this feeling has always been here

and I have always been this way.

All the God and gin in life cannot save me.

I am what I am.

And that is just like you.

And I'm drunk on my own. Are you proud of me yet?