"Why? Why do you do it?" I ask Mike, glancing a little too noticeably at his wrists. Mike looks down at his wrists then to mine as he gathers the words I never can find. I covet his insight and pseudo intellectualism, but I know at the same time it comes with a price. Mike smiles at me maliciously, "With all of this 'activity' going on in your head you've got to be prone to wanting to blow your brains out, right? It's like a God damned Irish wake up there, maybe you should tell the land lord." He says to me, smiling even bigger now, avoiding the question. We're in a local cafe, sitting in the corner and I'm getting odd looks now as people notice me giving the empty chair across from me worried looks. "Fuck those people, they're worthless. Their lives nor their opinions matter one bit." Mike assures me as he gently lifts my iced coffee off the table, weighing each movement carefully, and takes a thoughtful drink. "Also, I appreciate you switching to black coffee." He adds. "No problem, it's grown on me."

"I'm sure I have. You're wondering about the twitch you developed aren't you? You know how computers run more slowly and such when using two operating systems? You're not as sophisticated as a computer." I take that in for a moment, as Mike hands me the coffee. I take a contemplative sip, letting the cold bitter liquid dwell, the taste of which is tainted by my smoker's breath but not in a bad way. "So why do you do it?" I ask again, less compassionately, less carefully. He looks me in the eye, something's missing there. "Bloodletting. It's an old 'medical procedure'. The culture at the time didn't understand proper human anatomy and didn't understand the actual purpose of blood. When folks would get sick, they attributed it to 'bad blood'. That’s where the modern saying comes from. So when these people got sick, the cure they saw was to bleed the bad blood from them. Many people died from this because the large quantities they would take at a time. So that's what bloodletting is, bleeding the disease out. What I'm getting at is I, we, am/are sick. We've collected ill experiences, memories that plague, and sickness over the past twenty years. We're emotionally diseased. Figuratively speaking, there is someone else's blood running somewhere through our veins. Whose fault is that? Yours. You invested too much of us into someone else, now they've got ahold of us whether they or us like it. A tumor in your brain may not have asked to be there, but it will kill you regardless. I'm just trying to get rid of the bad blood."

"Mike. You said bloodletting didn't work."

"It was a fucking metaphor Riley."