He looks at me with a cold dead stare and shuts the door in my face, and I wish that this was a story, but it's not, and there's no ending or climax just the continuous cycle of up and down. So familiar I can predict when and what will happen. Is he drunk? Yes, but is he drunk enough? No. Not enough. He is angry drunk and so hide upstairs and turn up the music loud because all the intervening years have disappeared and this is the new kitchen table to huddle under, but this time there is no one else to sit with you. And I breath shallow and don't speak, and listen to his footsteps as he moves about the house. And when he finally sleeps, creep downstairs to survey the damage, and wait until the new day to see what he will be like.

Tonight, I am nothing, nothing to him.

A day when limitless possibilities close in and suddenly i'm left with an empty box of memories and a half filled house.

Tired and splurging, my brain shouts down to my mouth to say whatever I think, walking backwards but stuck to the floor. Running faster into nothingness and losing everything, no more pictures, no more drawings, no more speaking. Ragged breaths and stabbing pain. A thief, a bastard, a cheat. Hide and seek. It was always there, in the corner of my mind. Hide behind the boxes, crouch and shrink smaller and smaller and maybe we'll disappear.

Too late to change anything, too late to stop so keep running and don't look back because it will all have changed and we'll sink and see too far, past the end and further. Sleep screaming, sleep failing and unprotected. Open and wide and exposed and seen, falling deeper, away from this closer to that. Hitting mud and struggling through, slowing down too much and it's catching up and never running fast enough. What happened to those childhood bikes? They could evade this. Broken bottle and broken brick. This is what I am. When did it come to this? Songs lost along the way and strewn across the roadside, melodies darker. Loud in my ears, blood that beats fast and tears through me.

I've done it. I've shot myself in the foot again.

I am verbal and I am loaded.