BUT FOR NOW WE ARE YOUNG, LET US LIE IN THE SUN AND DOUBT EVERY BEAUTIFUL THING

I take part of a sleeping pill every night, and sometimes ibuprofen, too, and often I want to take the whole bottle, one or both, not because I want to commit suicide but because I want to be sure they do the job. The job of making me not hurt anymore. They never do. Marvellously inefficient things, OTC analgesics, I'm not sure why we have the things.

***

But there is this, as well: I make myself tired. I make myself guilty, too, starve myself of sleep and stuff myself with cheap and greasy food, and I think the reason I do it is so that I will feel like this, like I feel now, exhausted and on the verge of tears and so that I can finally think clearly, without all that bloody hope fogging up the system and confusing things.

Have you ever tried to live with hope in you, live like a healthy, normal person? It's like learning to breathe underwater, learning to breathe the water itself, or carbon dioxide; my mind can't process the world in this form, can't get anything useful from things when they're all bonded together into forms that have nothing to do with me.

***

And by the way, just so we're clear, I think hope is a bloody menace, and I do mean bloody, a clawed hand wrapped around and into your heart, and God help you if you try to dislodge it. It's got to be some kind of parasite; it feeds off you, that much is clear.

I wonder what hope's internal life is like, then, if it's an organism. Where does it go and what does it turn into when it's done with us?