Not a Good Night

I am alone most of the time these days. And I am in pain most of the time. For more than a year now, this relentless pain has been crawling about from my neck to my shoulder to my back, a bit better one day, a bit worse the next. It is as if there is a foreign creature entwined inextricably with my nervous system, endlessly eating and tearing. I feel like excising the entire right side of my body. Just being done with it. I am half a man with or without it. The pain was so bad this evening that I decided to try to kill it with alcohol. I was not successful. I am exhausted, and depressed, and alone. And I begin to wonder why. So many things seem, in hindsight, so senseless, so random, so pointless. My own narrative falls apart, and I begin to wonder which of a thousand mistakes is behind my damnation. The past is ended, is refuted by the present, and the present has no plan, no goal. I am abandoned. I am become an orphan. I am become my own ceaseless pain. How strange it is to have gone this far in life and gathered not a single true friend.