Sometimes

A/N: Yo. It's all made up.

If you have depression, they'll give you meds. If you have anxiety, they'll give you more meds. And if you have ADD, guess what, more meds.

They're supposed to make you feel better. But sometimes if you take the wrong combination, then they make you feel worse. And sometimes they keep you up all night for days on end, while you keep taking them like a zombie because you promised you would this time. You promised you wouldn't flush them down the toilet this time and take too little, you promised you wouldn't write a tearstained note and take too many.

You promised.

But then every single night you can hardly breathe, much less sleep, and every day you can barely speak because you're so tired and sick and miserable and maybe it's the meds but maybe it's not, maybe you're just so damn screwed up that it's your fault.

So you take them and you're starting to lose your mind and you just want to scream but you're stuck on this bus with your best friends who think you're okay, who have no idea. They make sure you take everything, they tell you, "We don't want you to end up like last time" but oh, you're beginning to think it's worse than last time.

The shows are hard. I'm unfocused. My energy is off. I fall too deep into the songs, sometimes so deep that I stop singing at the end and forget what's going on. I stay up in my bunk afterwards, writing and writing and hyperventilating and writing.

Sometimes you're crazy. You can't think straight.
And then one night you take another bottle with your shaky, sweaty hands, one that's not yours. It's your best friend's, his sleeping pills that he takes for insomnia, and you know you shouldn't touch that lid but the idea of sleep sounds absolutely beautiful right now.

And that night you sleep, plagued by nightmares and exhausted in the morning but still, you slept.

So there's another pill added to the pharmacy going down your throat, except this one you take in secret at night, hiding the bottle in your pillowcase so nobody knows. And you're feeling sicker, angrier, sadder, less stable than ever before but for some reason you just keep taking the damn things. You're afraid, maybe of the others, maybe the pills, maybe yourself.

"Guys, do any of you know where my sleeping pills went?" Wayne says the night after I took them.

I shake my head quickly. Ben and Platz answer no.

"Dan, are you okay?" he says when he looks back at me.

"Fine," I breathe.

"You're not getting...you've been good, right?"

I nod and then find a reason to leave the room, trying not to rip my hair out out of guilt and anger.

So now he knows, he has to know, he knows you better than anyone. You're not okay, you've never been okay and he must know that.

A week goes by. I'm so drugged up I can't function. Wayne can't sleep now either because his pills are gone.

Sometimes your life is crumbling before you and all you can do is force yourself through it. Sometimes you're tearing everyone to pieces with you and you want to break down and tell them but sometimes you have to keep going, trying not to pass out onstage, trying not to cry in interviews, trying not to fall apart.

And then sometimes, it's four in the morning and you're shaking so hard you can barely breathe and crying from bloodshot eyes in the bathroom mirror with four pill bottles spilled around you, staring at this guy in the reflection and wanting nothing more than to tear his skin off because it pains you to know he even exists, much less that you're trapped in his body and mind with no escape.