It's strange. I used to go out for three days at a time, spending money , drinking, laughing, fucking. A lot of -ings really. Pain was never a thing I thought about, sleep was never a necessity it just sort of happened when it needed to. Anxiety wasn't a reality I was really ever familiar with.

Cocaine was my best friend, my best friends were my brothers, and my family was third tier at the BEST of times. But it was all by design, keep those things separate, don't mix "work" with "family". Work was pleasure, 24/7 when I was young.

Right now I feel it. 20 years later, I feel it all acutely. I spend most, if not all of my time alone. I hear or see people carelessly talk or post regarding being depressed, or on anxiety, or blame a few hours of lost sleep on insomnia. I hear about their so called pain and it angers me. I am bitter, by my own design of course, because I remember when none of that was real.

And when I hear the talk I want to take them and MAKE them feel the pain or the anxiety, or experience real abysmal insomnia, where death is almost preferable. I think to myself, if you felt the real thing you'd have offed yourself a long time ago. I haven't because I am not fucking done. My body is betraying me. My WILL is strong. My body is falling apart. How do I even explain?

My brain is a muscle, and it hurts. That's where it all starts, obviously. Years ago I met a girl who absolutely ruined me in the most wonderful and devastating ways. Before here those things that hurt and haunt me were non-existent. She slowly changed me, made me stop the drugs, the booze, the week long benders. I gladly stopped because believe me when I say she was worth it.

Beautiful, Intelligent, hilarious.....inspiring to a piece of shit like me to try, TRY to be better to be someone who might one day deserve what I already had in her. Weird things happen mentally and physically when you go from hardcore drug fueled partying to absolute stop. Just like it sounds. A wall that I never saw all of a sudden took me down, an unstoppable force in me, meets an immovable object. Imagine it. A human body, the strongest minds, no one could ever be prepared for that. I wasn't. Sadly neither was she.

I broke. My body gave out, my mind cracked, it wasn't a peaceful experience, it was worlds colliding, what was left of me. I was strong. I held it together by the tips of my fingers, and tried to appear outwardly okay. I was not. I don't know when she sensed it, but I do know once she did that her love for me, her through thick and thin and forever love, it started to fade...it was slow and drawn out and I commend her for putting up with the pain that I put her through because I didn't know how to handle what was happening to me.

I know that no one else would ever have put up with what I put her through. She did love me. I hurt her so much, and she couldn't take it anymore...I remember the moment it ended.

The entire year leading up to the end, it was hell on earth. I said before no one else would have stayed and held me, helped me....and in truth no one did. my brothers were gone, one had died on me, the other scarred had run back to his own real family, and me, I stayed with her. My own real family didn't know what was happening, by design I always left them in the dark.

Hell, actual, true hell. and there was her, and there was me. I had never felt fear, I was always fearless, I remember having rifles to my head,, or driving through a border patrol check-point with 200lbs of cocaine just sitting in the trunk of a rental and I was never afraid. That year it came to me, the fear, i felt her slipping away and for the first time i was afraid.

How to explain it in words that do it justice?

I don't know who said it or where it was said, I am sure if someone even reads this they can educate me, but there's a famous quote about staring into the abyss and it staring back at you. Imagine that. For an eternity that abyss for me was comfort, it steeled my resolve. Because nothing ever stared back.

When I felt her, physically felt her slipping away, it opened it's eyes, it looked at, into, through me...and it laughed. A laugh that crumbled the walls around me, and in that quick instant I knew, and understood fear. Because love, the love I never understood till her, the one she gave me, it was slipping...and the fear shook me, and tore my body and my mind and reality itself. Through it she held me.

One day, it was December 2008. I want to say 18th, but at this point the year and day were not registering in my mind. I was on the floor, the pain and fear pulling me in opposing directions, I was crying. She called. it ALWAYS helped, although less and less by this time..but it was never worse when she called...always better... not this time..nothing had changed..not really..

BUT I FELT IT. it was the last straw,, it was a sheer drop off of a cliff into absolutely nothing. I don't pretend to be the only person to ever feel it, but I really hope not a lot of you have. A literal ending. Something that existed in the world suddenly ceasing to exist. I think it was in one of the star wars films when one of the jedi (im not looking it up) said that he felt as if a billion (sic) voices had suddenly been silenced.

That's what it was. Love existed, then, by my own design....I strung some word together that I will regret till the day I die, and she said ok, and I hung up, and I died.

It sounds do dramatic doesn't it. I died. How would I even know, I had never died before so what could I compare it to? I don't know really to be perfectly frank. But when the phone fell, and her voice, and her presence was just gone from me, there was quite suddenly an empty space, and in that split second, the abyss, the laughing staring abyss took up residence in that hole. And I died. If I didn't I wish I had.

The PROFOUND grief I felt for what was lost...in all honesty I wish that I could turn back time and trade my life for someone else...die before I ever met her...I would give all my remaining days to live the next 24 hours without the memory of her.

4 days. I lay on the floor, crying, there were 400 missed calls. i ignored. It was her, my mother, my brother....spam calls, life doesn't stop because one person dies. Only that persons life. And it did. for 4 days. I didn't go sit in a chair, or lie in bed, no I didn't move from where I had perished, curled up in a fetal position and I just wanted death. I felt her sweet embrace....she came and sat with me and I was gone...but 4 days passed and there I was. the phone ringing, knocks on the door, texts, emails, blah blah.

I was filled with a living void, eating away at me, I had pissed myself, I hadn't eaten, it slipped my mind to eat my gun, or I know I probably wouldn't have been able to stop myself, not in the state i was in, not like so many times since...

We talked. But it wasn't her. she was gone, when I died, she died too. We died and in that devouring void, those corpses are not coming back...The girl I knew was dead. I would never feel LOWER...but for years now the only real progress has been lateral movement, I can't remember the sun.

Pain. I feel it. imagine molten lava flowing through your veins, and imagine it being electrified. That's the physical pain I feel. The initial crash that toppled me I think created this pain..i take many meds, none help. It never stops and I deserve it. Don't I?

Sleep. I take cocktails of melatonin, seroquel, ambien, etc etc...sometimes I don't sleep for days, sometimes I sleep so much I piss myself and trigger welfare checks from my family.

Anxiety. lean back in your chair. Keep leaning...lean so far back that you almost fall...now imagine that just as you are about to fall and you feel your fight for flight reflex kick in you are zapped with a taser...that is how I feel, all the time. ALL the time.

I want to be better. For the girl I lost in that void. I can't say half of me died that day, it isn't true. All of me died. We both disappeared into that hole..except a part of me still remembers them...still sees their ghosts. I am haunted...I know she doesn't see them...I am glad she doesn't.

I want to die, to remove myself from this place where I have knowledge of them, what they were, what they had..what he killed.....I miss her so much.

There's a lot more I want to say...I just don't have the patience to type it out right now..I may or may not do it in the future...there's a lot of shit re: sleep that I need to say..