"Wen i take three pills the song begins to play, one that won't go away.
An' even though i kno one pill will get me through the day i take
two anyway, when i mix four pills with a drink the song starts to play
its in the back of my head an' its everywhere an' its all i can think about."

--


Prologue: The Final Sunrise

The touch of a pale hand brings a tiny cloud of smoke from the heat to the cold windshield it rests upon. You stare out with a blank expression on your face. Eyes that had once been a clear, crystalline blue stare out at the sky that is absent from the light of the moon and sun. It is earlier, far earlier than you have ever been awake without reason; it is so quiet you wonder if anyone in the world is awake but you. You stare at the mass of clouds that has formed over the horizon of the mountain range you can make out from your parents house in Beverly Hills. If you squint, you can make out the faint lines of the Hollywood sign through the thick fog that is the pre-morning life. As you did when you were a kid you trace your index finger down, up, around, left, and right about the glass, drawing tiny figures that were only visible to your eyes. You predict where the sun will rise in spite of the fact you have never witnessed it.
Dead in the center of the mountains. Center. Everything was centered. Everything, except your own existence.
Impatiently, a child laying in bed waiting for 8-o'clock in the morning to spring so he can run downstairs to open his presents on Christmas Day, you wait for the first sign of the massive ball of fire to peak up from the tip of the shortest mountain. There is nothing, has been nothing for the past two hours. You awoke too soon though you never remember going to sleep that night.
One of your clammy hands touches your forehead, the very same hand that had touched on the glass of the window. Your fingers were still crisp with the cold due of the morning sinking in through the clear plate of glass. A curse that has found you once more, just when you thought you were free of its constricting iron grip; the drugs have returned and with them the inability to remember many things you at one point drew comfort from.
This might be the most important morning in the life that you have lived and what you can remember of it. Your blue eyes dart around from hilltop to hilltop waiting for that first flash of brilliant gold.
This is your final sunrise and you want to actually see the sight that you took for granted for so long. You knew of its existence as you knew of the wind. For so long, 21 long years, you lived along side one of the most beautiful sights of nature and never had seen it. That all was going to change. You vowed it and though much could not be retained in your mind this is something you were holding onto. One of the last scraps of a glorious supper you never wanted to end.
Then, it happens without warning and had you blinked, you would have missed it. There is a flash of light from one of the shortest tips in your view from the vantage point of your bedroom window in your parents’ three-story Beverly Hills home. Once a palace where you played as a young prince, now, doomed to be your mausoleum. It shocked you then to know that the light was not that blinding color of splendid gold you had anticipated, in its place was a dimmer, imitating glow of gray. Rapidly, you met your eyelids together repeatedly, thinking that in doing so the color would return. After a long while of standing there nothing happened. By the time that the sun had made its way past the tallest peak you knew what had happened. Your eyes moved away from the window and down at the dark, but off-black carpet. You awoke to the morning life that day, a day that you would remember as long as you could, only to realize that you had been stricken colorblind in your sleep.
At that moment you relinquish whatever flickering ember of optimism that was struggling to keep its flame going. What was the use? You were permanently damned to the four walls that surrounded you and on your last day of freedom, you could not even enjoy the rising of the sun. God had a dry, wry, near-sand sense of humor when he over looked the file of your life.
He's gone through so much, lets make the fucker colorblind and put the topping on his shit cake!
You glance up at the ceiling where a motionless ceiling fan is stationed and you curse the power above you with every word you had ever known.
And so began your first day of the rest of your life in incarceration in the place you had sought sanctuary in days long forgotten. You had made mistakes, swore never to repeat them hoping wistfully against all odds that in doing so someone, some God or Demi-God alike would take pity on your soul and remove a year off of your sentence in purgatory. They overlooked your request and you were almost positive that they were laughing at you. You? Appeal to the Gods? Yes, the thought was laughable indeed.
Ha-fucking-ha.
Funniest shit ever.
Now, you had but one remaining companion. Your room had been stripped of what had set it apart, made it your own. Just as you had it was whipped clean while expected to sit back and take its place along the gray line of life. Another face in the crowd, cloud in the sky, grain in the sand. You have only yourself, however, the more you think about it the more you are reminded that you are not alone in the room.
Without the knowledge of why your body willed itself automatically to stand directly in front of the window as you had been only moments before. Your body had been doing that for some time now—acting without a need of your consent. Great, when you had hit rock bottom life had blessed you with a rebellious teenager in charge of your body.
Vacantly you continued to stare out of the window, only this time you were not focused on the scenery outside, but on your own reflection that you had not seen in days. They had taken the mirror out of your room when they stripped it, deeming it far too dangerous for you to have in your possession. So now, whenever you could catch a fleeting glimpse of a face you had taken for granted along with the sunrise, you are fascinated.
Your own eyes, sucked clean of color so now appearing like the stones of a castle in the fairytale world you often escaped to, held a type of sorrow that charmed you like a snake. Blades of black stood out against the pale gray that you were slowly learning to identify as your own. But, the strange thing was that the eyes meeting your own did not feel like they belonged to you. They felt borrowed, foreign and when they stared at you, you could see a hatred so deep in them you nearly drowned in the choppy waves. Those eyes, the eyes of a stranger, with those thick lines so bold, thick, and rugged almost made you fear. Suddenly, you felt foolish. You, fearing yourself? That was almost as funny as God’s take on your life.
"But you should fear me."
A voice that sounded almost, but not quite, like your voice filled the room. It echoed mysteriously and did not land it all. It was an eternal sound that just when you thought it had died down slightly, the voice relived to a dull roar.
"W-whose there?" You look around frantically, wondering, fearing, thinking the worse. Your breath hitches in your throat restrictingly, now allowing you to get enough air into your mind when you need it the most. Your thoughts began to get out of hand, irrational, yet, you could not do a thing to stop them.
Who had gotten into your room? Your back falls against the window and you search the white room to find nothing at all but your bed, a folded laptop, and the television that was on and muted. The voice could not have come from there. So, if not the television, then where?
A hand as cold as ice slammed down on your shoulder, followed by the sound of menacing laughter. Strangely, standing there with your back to the window, you felt the brush of lips on your earlobe. The heat from the impending words could be felt on the tiny hairs down the nape of your neck. From behind, someone had been watching you all alone.
"Fear me, motha'fucka. I'm in yo' head..."