He stands up, removes his leather jacket for the first time in what feels like months, and hangs it on the back of the bathroom door. He pulls off his shirt. His torso is soft, covered in faded tattoos that have blurred like old memories.
But now, it looks like a starting point instead of an ending.
The same face. Same gray stubble. Same vein.
He stands there, shivering, letting the ice wash over his head, down his back, over the scar on his ribs from a stage dive gone wrong in ’97. The cold doesn’t kill him. It just wakes him up.
The face looking back is not the man who once snarled “Burning Down the Weekend” on MTV Unplugged . This man has yellowed eyes, a two-day gray stubble, and a vein on his temple that throbs like a metronome counting down to zero.
He wakes with a start, mouth tasting like a burned circuit board. The hangover isn’t a headache; it’s a full-body reckoning.
