Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

Journal,

The first thing that struck me when I woke up is that my head is pounding. I squinted my eyes to avoid a stream of sunlight that is seeping through the curtains and touched my temple. I felt the pulsing of blood moving into my brain, and for a second this thought made me want to vomit. I put my hand down and finally noticed the slumbering bundle of sheets and flesh besides me.

"Who are you?" I mumbled, and for the first time it strikes me that my garbled speech and my throbbing head are most likely both the result of heaving drinking the night before.

As expected, the slumbering girl continued to sleep. Despite this, I continued talking aloud. "Where am I?"

A new question entered my mind. What the fuck am I doing?

You'd expect that if you lived like me, if you did the things that I do, eventually you'd stop feeling bad about it. Eventually, the wave of disgust, (or is that drinking induced nausea?), would die down until the point where it disappeared. The truth is that most of the time this sentiment is correct, but every once in awhile your mind goes so slow that everything catches up with you, and you're left feeling... empty.

I grabbed my cell-phone and pressed my only set speed dial.

"Xavier?" Marie-Claire said on the other end of the line. I was about to ask her to come pick me up from where ever I was, and bring some bloody Ibuprofen, when I thought better of it and ended the call. I wasn't going to put her through this again.

As cliche as it sounds, I honestly think that Marie-Claire will be the only person in my lifetime to see me for what I actually and love me despite this. It's not like I don't know that she loves me. It's also not like I don't love her, as weird as that sounds to admit. But I'm not idiotic. I can't change, and if I can, I won't change for long. Marie-Claire is also not idiotic either, and I'm sure she realizes this, and realizes that eventually she'll have to leave me and move on with her life, because I am the cancer that weighs her down. So, yes, neither of us are idiotic, but we're both idiots.

"Can you move over a bit?" an old lady who kept on eying me suspiciously asked me as I stared out the window of the bus on my way back to school. I tore my eyes away from the blur of passing buildings and looked up at her.

"Sod off, grandma."

She gasped and moved farther down the bus to another seat. I took this opportunity to return to my listless staring out of the window.

"Youth these days," said some girl a couple seats behind me. Rolling my eyes, I turned around to confront my adversary. Half expecting to see some girl that I had slept with and then never called, I was instead confronted with Marie-Claire, whose small, barely there smile kind of made everything okay.

"Do you have room for me up there?" she asked. I nodded and she came to sit next to me. I leaned against her side and buried my face in her hair, trying to fight off my splitting headache.

"What are you doing here?" I grumbled.

"I figured you'd done something stupid and were trying to slink back to school unnoticed," she replied.

"God," I groaned and took Marie-Claire's hand in mine. "Why do I ever leave you? I'm happy here."

We must have been a strange sight, I admit. The perfectly perm-pressed princess with her billowing skirt and white head-band; her clean cotton aura constantly getting muddied by my grubby t-shirts and wasteful extravagance. She's all I need. But I can't do that to her. She deserves better than this. She deserves a chance to escape. After all, that's why I leave. Part of it, at least.

"What are we going to do about you?" she whispered into my ear.

"Escape," I replied monotonously. "Escape and let Rome burn."