I have a new home, and I know it’s not good for me. Almost every night this past week I’ve found myself hiding in my parking garage, smoking cigs and hoping no one from my apartment building sees me. I am running from my life.

Every few months I find myself in this place of self sabotage. I drink, I smoke, I stay up late and thinking about how lost I feel.

What I like about my parking garage is there’s not much service, so I can’t scroll on my phone unless I use cell data. So I sit with music playing from my pocket and cigarette smoke surrounding my area. It feels good to feel bad, and I’m not sure what that’s about.

Tonight I sit on top of my car, beer in one hand and a smoke in the other. I light them up one after another, thinking what am I doing with my life?

I’m talking to a fantastic girl that I am starting to push away – because I just can’t handle the thought of falling in love in the near future. I’m navigating an already toxic “friendship” with another girl, who wants more. I called my ex tonight, because she asked me to and I always give in to her wants. I drove home drunk last night, which is uncool. My laundry sits on the chair in my living room, clean but unfolded. My daughter is asleep upstairs, but I am below the building being a mess. I write a message to my dad that I’ll probably never send or say. It’s 10PM and I know I should take a shower and go to bed, but instead I’ll drink and fuck up my sleep schedule. I am fighting with myself about taking my meds. There’s this little voice in my head that says fuck it, don’t take them tomorrow. See what happens. But I KNOW what happens.

5 cigarettes and one beer later and I’m still there, too frozen to move. I see the ashes all over the top of my car, the carcasses of the death sticks I inhale, the empty Two Women’s bottle, and I think this is not how I want to live. But, it is how I live. At least for right now. Because quite frankly I just don’t have the energy to be any better than this right now. I always fall apart before I clean up my act.

But tonight I’ll write, and I think that’s at least one thing I am doing right.