6 a.m. he calls me – I am in a dead sleep, or sleeping like the dead & he’s on my doorstep with no keys. He’s slurring. It’s hard to get him inside; he hasn’t left my apartment in 2 years so now he lives here. Has he been drugged? He’s crying & I am worried someone stabbed him in the spinal cord. He says he’s just drunk, though he is vomiting blood and making me nervous. He said he had a dream a few hours before that he died: “Love me or I’ll die.” But I hate him in this moment. He keeps saying he will die if I continue to be emotionally cold, why am I such a goddamn ice queen? Then he says he’s wasted his 32 year old life. This is when I call poison control. They say to wake him up every half hour. I am terrified to go back to sleep, but I am sick with a head cold and night shifts. I don’t know if it’s the alcohol talking or a metaphor for how he really feels about me, this wasteland. It’s now 7 a.m. I can’t believe he’s so careless. I notice he’s knocked over my latest painting – it’s on the floor in the kitchen. Maybe it fell from the telepathic force of his self-absorption. He looks up at me in a stupor, and says that he’s just finally understood my art, and it really does mean something.