Btwn black and nothing

Sometimes, I'm not sure what to do. Just have no flippin' idea of how to respond, when to respond, if I should respond...Lord knows I try to love, but there are times when I feel like a stranger in my own home, Hell, I feel like a stranger in my own skin. I don't recognize myself, don't feel like myself, don't feel anything, and don't really like myself if I cared enough to even consider it.

At times like this, bathing is optional and not because I want to offend, but because I just don't care enough to make the effort. It's no wonder someone told me I looked like a homeless person for the simple fact that I did. And although I lived in a house with a legitimate address, I still felt homeless, like a drifter careening through the area like a dusty marble seeking the path of least resistance.

I'm sure lots of people have regrets, rue the missed opportunities, kick themselves for not getting that degree, not taking that job offer, whatever. How many people question whether they are a positive force for their kids when they feel a fifth wheel, fear their kids see them as a fifth wheel, as an embarrassment, as a wild-looking homeless slob? Tears do no good, only clearing a path through the grit on your cheeks and giving you a fucking "bash-your-face-in" headache that turns into a throbbing reminder of what was, what coulda been, what you are and what you aren't.

What can you do when you can't even put your damn shoes and socks on without help? What can you do when your own family doubts the seriousness and severity of your illness? What can you do when any kind of activity--taking out the garbage, shaving, having sex, kicking a soccer ball, sweeping a floor, reading a book, buying food--causes escalating pain that robs you of your breath, makes the smallest movement excruciating, brings gritted teeth and unseen tears welling in the eyes.

The pain, your ever-present companion, takes on a life of its own. It makes living a sequence of studied, mechanical moves so not to awaken the beast from its relative slumber. Still, the intensity required to keep it down grinds at your soul, like an erasure on a math paper in which you failed to study that particular equation, rubbed down, dirty, leaving tiny shards of the whole scattered around like human confetti. This sucks, it really really sucks.

If you take the medications prescribed for the break-through pain, you can no longer function in any capacity, as a family man, as a man, as a human being. You become a whole erasure again but with an erasure's measure of emotion. You forget conversations, you forget appointments, often you forget what day it is. You forget how to live. You forget who and what you are, what you were, what you should've been. You withdraw, hoping the shell is strong enough to protect you from outside forces. You miss your family, you miss your friends, you miss yourself because the person in that shell is nothing but a shell of what you wanted to be.

Pain. My only friend. I fucking hate you more than you can ever know.