Reality Bites.

Sometimes it's better not to ask. I laugh as I think it, but the sound is short-lived and hedged with bitterness. There's nothing funny about incapacitation.

Nervously, I slip a fingernail between my teeth. It's snack time for the panicked. I've been thinking. Plotting. Trying to find a way to have things work out for the best - best for me, of course. I know your mind far too well to expect success here. You think me erratic and baleful - too volatile for the pink-tinted world that you work tirelessly to manipulate. You are your own god, and yet you believe in nothing - not even yourself. Certainly not in me.

The thought of it - of escaping with you - nothing ever sustained anybody so completely. It is all that has been keeping me going. I dine nightly on my own misery, desperate to make it disappear - but it's bad for the system and always resurfaces in the morning.

Sometimes it's better not to know. I can almost hear your answer now. Only it wouldn't be an answer, really. It would be an amused sort of incredulity, sharp and silver, the final nail in my heavy, wooden sleeping bag. A perpetual resting place. I can picture you shaking your head, just as you did last time...the last idea. The need wasn't nearly so pronounced that time - the straight-faced no, a kick to the gut, it didn't hurt so much. Not as much as this would. Not nearly as much. I caught my breath that time.

No. Sometimes it's better to pretend. If I can keep myself selfishly believing that one day, things will be just as unbearable for you...if I can keep myself clinging to the thought of you, my freshly-painted life-saver, a bright patch bobbing merrily along the surface, maybe then I'll manage to keep myself together.

But the pieces are falling fast. I only have two hands, each as inept as the other at holding onto anything at all. I never could juggle. I have to get away before I drop everything...let go...

A bird in a cage, I can't stand being here. Upon reflection, it was stupid. Coming here, wanting this. I am my own special plague, hungry to conquer; incapable of leaving anything but destruction behind. Things are different with you.

You won't want to. I know it, and I know I'll hate you for it. And I couldn't bear to hate you. So I won't ask. Not yet. Maybe never.

We'll see.