Laugh at my scars/I made them all

"How long has it been?" he whispers in the warm darkness of the room. We are laying side-by-side on my bed, me on my stomach, Tom curled around me like a cat with one arm thrown over my waist. I'm staring down at my arm, my eyes tracing the scars over and over in a precise pattern that never changes, but he's looking up at me, looking into my eyes. Trying to read what I'm feeling there.

"Seventy-two days." My voice comes out sounding tired. I am tired, I'm fucking exhausted. It's not the touring...well, not all by itself. It's everything in my life. The good things, the bad things, it makes no difference, it's all fuel for the fire.

"That's a long time. Are you...happy?" He's trying to be comforting, I can tell, that's why I don't strangle him. Six months we've been going out, four since I told him my secret, but he just doesn't understand. It's not about happiness anymore. Maybe it never was. It's about needing to feel that little sting, needing to watch the blade sink in...I don't tell him any of this. He'd never understand.

So I lie. "Yes," I murmur, twisting slightly to drop a kiss upon his brow. He smiles and snuggles deeper into the blankets, eyes falling closed. It's nearly 3:00 in the morning, we should both be getting to sleep. Instead I untangle myself from his embrace and slip from bed.

"Travis?" He sounds drowsy and confused. "Where're you goin'?"

"Just to the bathroom, sweetheart. I'll be right back." I think he murmurs something like an affirmation but I am already out the door.

I lock the bathroom door behind me, just in case Mark happens to be up, then I curl up into a ball on the cold tile, hugging my knees to my chest. The tears start slowly, just a tightening dryness in my throat, a faint blurring of my vision. My hands clench into fists as I cry, achingly empty, craving the cool weight of the blade. I wish there was someone I could tell, someone who could understand. Tom loves me...but he doesn't understand. He thinks it's about willpower. Like when he decided to quite smoking, and he just stopped, no tapering off, no nico-fucking-tine patch, just quite because he made up his mind that he would. Just don't do it, he tells me.

*C'mon, Travis, please, just don't do that shit. It's not healthy, it's totally fucked. Just don't do it, okay?*

Okay, Tom. I'll stop for you. Just for you, because you are so damn beautiful and you asked me so nicely...

And I did, too. For awhile. Until the need became to much, and I fell back into old patterns. Mark could never understand why I didn't get shit-faced after shows like the rest of them. The truth is, I hate the taste of alcohol, and I don't need it. This is my drug.

Seventy-two fucking days. It feels like a lifetime.