2009-08-22 / 11:30 p.m.

I played a drinking game with two girls younger than me and drank a mixture of beer and wine and vodka and cider all mixed up in a bowl with lumps of ice and my boyfriend's brother told me that he wouldn't bother with talking to me again if I didn't have anything to do with his brother. His cousin told me he would.
There was a fifteen year old and a thirteen year old and they were drinking too, only every time we heard the door bang, they put their glasses to the floor and hoped that their breath didn't stink too much.
There's been a lot of stress in that household lately.

I took Maria - beautiful, beautiful Maria - home from the hospital yesterday. She's spent since June in different beds and different wards but never her own. Never a bed she wanted to be in. We were stuck in traffic for hours and hours yesterday and she made me turn Damien Rice up to the last because she said it was the first piece of decent music she'd come across in months and she wasn't prepared to let it go.
I put her to bed, her own bed, when we got back to their house and I fell asleep on her sofa - their sofa - until my love came home.

Somebody dropped a jar of beetroot on the floor and I left to use the toilet, leaving my glass on the table inside the door. I come back to a bloody mess all over the floor, glass in every corner and two brothers standing so close to each other I know that they can taste each other's breaths.
One tells the other to stop making his sister cry, that she's not the one that needs to cry - that it's him that needs to cry, needs to let it out.
They were both so angry.
That boy spun from that room and left that house and sobbed near the gate for more than an hour.
I offered to look for him but my boyfriend asked me "What makes you think he'll come out of hiding for you?" and he said it in such a way that really stung and I apologised because I didn't know what else to do.

There's been so much stress in that household lately.

I fell out that door and looked at the sky 'til I began to see stars that might not have even really been there and I found myself wondering why this matters, why the fuck this should matter, because the universe is so much bigger than me and so much bigger than us. Trying to thicken my skin. Trying to make myself stronger.
It weakened me, realising the magnitude of everything and knowing that nothing will ever matter enough to be a part of permanence. Not even a star a million lightyears away. It too will fade.
And I cried. Oh God, I cried.