worst ; gawsten

three

He's thinking he should just stay off Twitter.

Or at least stop searching their names and scrolling through until he's seen each tweet at least three times.

There's so much love; they're trying to trend hashtags and tweet cute messages and profess their love and it's sweet, but they're also telling her to kill herself and calling her a whore and sending her death threats and while he shouldn't be bothered by it, while he shouldn't care...part of him still cares about her and with each tweet he reads his stomach turns a little more.

He wants her to suffer but he doesn't want this. She deserves hell for what she did but no one deserves an army of relentless angry fans spamming their Instagram comments and twitter mentions with promises of murder.

He's still so tired. His head is throbbing. He played the show last night but couldn't even try to hide his tears. Geoff, bless his motherfucking heart, did most of the talking and hyping the crowd up. He tried his best and it was barely enough and he collapsed in his bunk afterward and fell asleep to a damp pillow and tear tracks staining his cheeks.

They have another show to play tonight and then tomorrow off. He wishes it were switched. He doesn't want to leave his bunk today. The headache is so bad. He's never had one this bad before. It's migraine status, pounding right behind his eyes and pulsating painfully whenever he lifts his head.

He closes Twitter and opens his Notes app, navigating to the lyrics he wrote days ago.

They're not bad. They're not bad at all. They're rough and messy but that's the beauty of it. Raw, unpolished, pure emotion. When he recorded it that's what it became. His voice isn't as strong as usual and the track isn't as clean and studio-produced as it would be if he were producing it in an actual studio, but it's honest. It's messy and fragmented because he's living in that world.

Nothing makes sense right now. His world is messy and fragmented and confusing and he feels betrayed and abandoned and lonely and so many more things that he can't sort through long enough to distinguish a distinct emotion from. It's all a jumble, mish mash of too many feelings that he poured into that song and he's so fucking proud of it. It's sad and shitty and his throat starts to close every time he reads through the lyrics but he managed to take a feeling so confusing and put it into words, managed to immortalize the feeling which may not be the best idea because he knows it'll become a song he puts on repeat whenever he has a bad day.

He wants the fans to hear it. He wants them to know what's going on, to know why he keeps crying on stage every night and what exactly happened between them. They deserve that much. They're so worried about him.

He gets flurries of tweets asking if he's okay and hears them screaming their love at shows and meets some at meet and greets who look at him with worry in their eyes and hug him a little longer and hold on a little tighter, communicating unspoken concern.

They deserve to know the truth.

He swings his legs over the edge of the bunk and winces as the blood rushes to his head when he moves too fast. He grabs a shirt off the floor and pulls it over his head, and then slips his feet into a pair of boots.

When he stands he wobbles a bit, unsteady. Holding a hand to his head, he stumbles into the lounge and grabs his Macbook off the table. He slips it into the messenger bag draped across one of the chairs and hefts that over his shoulder, and then walks down the aisle and off the bus.

There's a Starbucks just up the road.

Soundcheck is in two hours.

He's got enough time.