As Tweeted (and unedited):

She turned the music up as loud as she could stand.

The “City of Delusion” wasn’t deluding her, but if she could drown out conversation and the possibility thereof…

She could feel free, floating on the wings of piercing decibels for a few brief minutes.

The minutes pass.

The silence swells.

It’s overwhelming her while the CD player rotates, in search of a new track, a new medicine to ease her pain.

“Head like a hole. Black as your soul!”

She preps a proverbial vein and waits for her next fix even as her voice is growing raw.

“…grow wings and rise above it all…” Ani Difranco laments the building of strip malls.

But the “harm here is harm there” and “aggression begets aggression” is speaking to a different part of her, as she stands in her kitchen.

Dinner is served. Anger bubbles below the surface, threatening to cover everyone nearby, to trap them like residents of Pompeii.

While the dishes sit drying, she stands before the speakers, her new goddess.

“Will you bite the hand that feeds you?” She shouts. She knows her emotions have nothing to do with Trent Reznor’s original thoughts.

She doesn’t care.

She feels the tears streak her cheeks, ruining her Stepford makeup.

The CD player goddess finds a new message for this jilted and hapless soul.

“And the Empire fell on its own splintered axis.”

She wonders if it’s irony that the only peace she feels is vibrating the vase off the speaker.

But it’s too loud to think.

That was her plan.

To drown out her thoughts because they’re so much louder than anything else in the room.

To make the pain in her head equal the pain in her heart.

End.