**TRIGGER WARNING** Talking about depression and addiction.

Get in the differential lane

It's the only way you'll ever survive

You think I'm joking kid? Look again

Just try and keep up with my stride

--From the song Differential Lane

Lyrics By Orion Bauwens

"You okay?"

I nod to Gloria and grin. She gives me a huge smile back and then walks off to the side of the room. I'm giving an interview. It's been a year since I had OD'd.

After my hospital stint I went back to rehab, only for ninety days this time. I'm really fucking happy to say I've actually been sober this entire time. For the first time in my life I feel like I have my shit together. It's scary. But it's also really invigorating.

We went back on tour recently. The entire thing sold out. Every single fucking date. I guess people missed me. Well, us. Who would've thought, right?

We're playing a gig tonight, and we had one yesterday. Today is filled with back-to-back interviews during the day. Which is fine--I don't mind. But this specific interview...

This one is really important. This one, I've been working on behind the scenes for months. This is the only one I'm nervous about.

Why? Because I've teamed up with several different streaming services and am going to do a live interview. I've been working with the interviewer for a long while. I went to them last year and gave them my pitch, telling them what I had in mind.

His name is Scott Davis. He's an actor I met during my second stint in rehab. He's also an advocate for addicts; he uses his celebrity status to bring awareness to people.

I always thought celebrities like that were just pretentious fucks. Like, "Oh hey, give me more attention besides what I'm already famous for!" I assumed they thought the world revolved around them.

There was a brief time this past year where I considered doing a TED Talk instead of this interview. But like I said, not only would I have felt pretentious, but I also don't like how it's inconceivable for the average person to attend because tickets are so damn expensive.

Thus here I am, sitting in a directors chair as someone fusses over my makeup last-minute. I'm sitting in a suit--a suit!--black with a black shirt and red tie. My hair is kinda spiky--I took the time to put gel in it.

I feel like a douche, not gonna lie, but Scott told me to dress like this. Yeah, that's right--Scott told me. It's not like that though. I mean it is, but it isn't.

Scott's a really nice guy. He doesn't mean to be bossy. If anyone else told me to put a suit and tie on--not ask, but told me--I'd say 'fuck you' and probably punch them in the face.

But Scott? He has this domineering personality where you just want to listen. When he says, "Oh no, chap, you mustn't dress like you normally do, no no no. That will not do. You won't be taken seriously! You must wear a suit, you simply must," with his British accent, talking at you like he's eighty but he's actually younger than I am, well...You show up in a fucking suit and tie. It's just how Scott is.

Scott and I are unlikely friends. He's very straight-laced (minus the drug and drinking problem). All the ladies flock to his films because he's so good looking. He's the type of guy that owns a yacht and eats caviar.

Yet he's quickly become one of my best friends. He's also a damn good actor, so he gets my respect for that alone. I know he respects me for my music; he doesn't get it, Mr. I Like Classical Only, but we have a mutual artistic understanding. I'm very lucky to have him in my life, that's no lie.

"Ready?" Scott asks with a lopsided smile that, admittedly, used to make me go weak in the knees a bit. I quickly got over it. He's as straight as...Well, something that's very straight.

"I guess," I reply with laugh.

He gives me a wink. "You'll be fine, chap."

I give out another laugh, rubbing my hands against my pants.

"Ready?" the person behind the camera asks, the person whose name I've forgotten already.

I bite my lip and look at Gloria, who gives me an enthusiastic two thumbs up. I look at Scott and I'm about to back out, but he grins at me.

"This is just me and you talking, eh?"

I take a deep breath. "Yeah...Just you and me talking."

Scott makes a circle with his finger, signaling the recording to start. Well, here we go.

"Hi everyone!" he greets in his proper, perfect English accent, "This is Scott Davis--"

I give two peace signs. "And this is Orion Bauwens--"

Scott laughs. "You screwed it up already, you pillock! I was supposed to introduce you!"

I throw my head back and cackle.

Scott gets up and stands in front of me, adjusting his own blue tie and raising a single eyebrow at the camera. "And this is Orion Bauwens--"

I shove him out of the way and we both laugh.

"Okay, okay, enough!" he shouts at me, hitting me in the arm with his flashcards we've both written stuff down on. He sits back in his seat. "And this is Orion Bauwens of the band, Saturn Mutants."

I look at him and press my lips together. I cross my legs, wrapping my hands around my knee.

"So Scott--" I blow a raspberry and fold in half, laughing.

Scott laughs. "Oh my--what're you doing?! We're live!"

Sitting up, I can feel my face is bright red. "I know, I know. Sorry, I'm just nervous." I shake out my hands and take a deep breath. "Okay. I'm serious now."

Now Scott breaks out laughing.

"Shit, maybe this wasn't a good idea--oh fuck, I'm I not supposed to swear?"

"Well you just said fuck," Scott replies, "so it doesn't matter?"

"Okay," I say, taking another deep breath.

"Okay," he says, calming down himself. "So!"

"So."

"How'd we meet?"

I look at him. "Oh, shit, we're jumping right in?"

"Why not?"

"No! Ask about the band name."

Scott jabs the flashcards loudly with his finger and stands up. "That's not what's on the bloody card!"

We both laugh. He sits back down.

"We probably lost like, five million viewers already," I say. "I kinda doubt people tuned in to watch us make asses out of ourselves."

"Actually," someone off to the side says loudly, causing Scott and myself to look off camera, "in the minute and a half we've been recording two thousand more people signed on."

Scott and I look at each other. Scott sits up straighter, eyebrows raised.

"I guess maybe we should continue to act like brutish twats?"

I sit up straight and imitate his English accent. "Indubitably, my good man!"

"Alright alright. So, what does Saturn Mutants mean? You've never talked about it in interviews." He snorts. "It always made me think a bit of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

I laugh at that. "Naw, nothing nearly as cool."

I take a deep breath. Here we go.

"The band formed back when Ben, Jake and myself were still in High School. They kinda twisted my arm into joining the band, and then they shoved me into being the leader. We had a bunch of pretty horrible names over the years--"

"Saturn Mutants isn't?"

"Screw you!" I laugh.

"Okay, okay, sorry. Continue."

"So anyway...Well, I wasn't exactly, erm, happy in High School. I didn't feel like I belonged. I felt like I was a mutant, or sometimes I'd think I was from Mars--you know, the whole, Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars?"

"Yeah."

"But I didn't want it to be totally derived, so I picked Saturn randomly, and here we are."

Scott smiles. I know that smile. It's the smile he uses in therapy when we're about to get into heavy stuff. Fuck. Here we go.

"And here we are."

I rub my hands against my pants.

"So," Scott continues, "you felt like a mutant in High School?"

"Kind of. I wasn't...Like anyone else. No one else I knew, anyway." I laugh at myself. "That sounds really emo." I drop my voice a few octaves and put a hand over half my face like hair hanging down. "No one understands me..."

Scott laughs and I stop.

"No, but seriously. I was living in a trailer park with my adoptive parents."

Scott's eyebrows shoot up. "Wait, what? You're adopted?"

"Yeah."

"I didn't--you never told me that!"

I shrug. "It never came up?"

"Alright, so you were living in a trailer park--"

"Yeah. And we--well, my parents and I didn't get along. It was mostly my fault. I mean, they were doing their best. I wasn't--I wasn't the best kid, I guess." I bite my fingernail but then stop. "But yeah. I didn't go to school with anyone else who was as poor as I was. I didn't go to school with anyone else who lived in a trailer. My grades sucked. I was a bit of a misfit."

"Unpopular?"

"No, kinda the opposite honestly. I was kinda the class clown?" I laugh. "Like in the stupid yearbook I was voted, 'Most Likely To Join The Cast Of Jackass.'"

Scott laughs.

"But yeah. I never had the attention span for school. I didn't take it seriously."

"So then you started Saturn Mutants?"

"Well, I didn't start it--Jake and Ben did. They just roped me into it."

"Why did you go along with it?"

That was, more or less, a prompted question. I knew that one was coming.

"I had zero future. We got picked up from a record label at one of our gigs, so when the opportunity presented itself I jumped on it."

"Why do you say you had no future?"

"Well...I was really, really depressed. I'm talking like, suicidal depressed."

Scott nods, silently encouraging me.

"When we started touring everyone kept telling me, 'You better have a plan B'. But I didn't have a plan B. It was my music or nothing. Because my life...My life consisted of failing grades and a trailer with a rusted out car sitting in the driveway."

"So you had to?"

"At that point in my life, more or less...Yeah."

Scott rests his cheek against his fist. "Did you know back then you were depressed?"

I shifted uncomfortably, but I wanted to do this. I just have to keep reminding myself, I wanted this. "Yeah. I, uh, I started hurting myself. And I did that because it distracted me from the emotional pain. But I hid all that."

"How do you hide something like that?"

I laugh nervously. "Long sleeves? No, but seriously. That's why I was the class clown. Because if I distracted everyone and made everyone laugh around me by what I did, they wouldn't notice me."

"Oh, so you were redirecting?"

"Yes! Exactly. If I gave people a reason to laugh, then they wouldn't get close to me. They just expected me to be funny and silly. So I sort of, I kind of kept everyone at arm's length so they couldn't notice how much I was struggling."

"Why didn't you want anyone to know you were struggling?"

"It's another reason why I acted out like I did. I knew I couldn't be the only one who felt the things I was feeling, I wasn't the only one thinking the things I was. I was in a really dark place, I was thinking some really dark things. I didn't want anyone to go through what I was going through. So I did my best to just make everyone laugh."

"Wow. That's--that's really valiant of you."

I laugh bitterly. "More like foolish."

Scott cocks his head to the side. "Why do you say that?"

"Because then maybe I would've gotten the help I needed instead of--well."

He can tell I'm starting to get uncomfortably uncomfortable, so he tries to lighten it up. He leans forward and laughs, hitting my leg with the cards. "But then we wouldn't have met!"

I grin. "Yeah, that is a good point."

"Alright alright alright. So you made your escape in music."

"Yeah...But nothing got better. Not really, anyway."

"How?! You became rich and famous! You had stacks of money, and cars, and you were up to your eyes in women--"

I laugh. "Oh get off it. You and I both know it's not everything it's cracked up to be."

"What, you mean four stints of rehab, two DWI's, and one assault arrest isn't worth it?"

He's referring to himself. Yeah, he's kinda a wreck. But I can't talk.

"Depends on the day," I tell him with a wolfish grin.

"Alright, seriously though," Scott says, "when did you realize that things weren't working?"

I take a deep breath and let it out, running my hands through my hair. I then look at them. "Fuck, I forgot I was wearing hair gel. This is why I don't do this shit with my hair."

Scott laughs.

"Is my hair screwed up?"

"Well aren't we the prima donna?"

"You're the one who told me to dress like this!"

He cackles. So I go over to him and smear my hands in his hair. He beats me off with the cards. "Go sit down and answer my question!"

I sit. "Okay but seriously, is my hair fucked?"

"No! Dear Lord..."

"Okay. Uh, what was the question?"

He rolls his eyes. "You're hopeless. It was, when did you realize being famous maybe wasn't the best thing for you?"

"Oh!" I look directly at the camera. "Summer of '18. I wanna apologize specifically to the crowd that was at the Nashville concert. It was genuinely a good concert, so I'm not going to apologize for that. But I want to apologize to anyone who's watching that was at that concert because I was completely hammered."

"You were drunk?"

"Yeah." I look back at Scott. "It was the first time I took the stage drunk in my entire career. I always promised myself I'd perform sober. I broke my promise that day, so I'm sorry."

"Hey--" Scott says to the crew to the side. "Google that concert. See if there's footage anywhere."

"On it," the person says. A few seconds later someone with an ear piece and a tablet comes to us. Scott and I crane our necks.

"Here," the guy in black says, "I found it on YouTube."

Scott looks up at the guy as I watch my performance. "Can the people watching see this?"

"Yeah," the stage hand says, switching to our feed. "They see it like this, with the YouTube video playing in the bottom corner--"

"Wait," I say, "go back to YouTube!"

The guy hits the full screen. After a moment I start bobbing my head and singing along. After about half a minute the guy walks away. I'm still singing though, closing my eyes and hamming it up a bit.

"So you were drunk there?" Scott asks me in disbelief.

I open my eyes and laugh. "I don't even remember performing that song!"

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah! I mean, sure it was two years ago but, shit."

"It wasn't on the docket," Gloria says from off to the side.

Scott and I both look over, and I put my hand to my ear. "What was that?"

"It wasn't part of the set list," she says louder, "you insisted on giving three encores that night!"

I screw up my face. "I did?"

She laughs. "Yeah."

I look back at the concert. "Alright, Nashville guys, I guess I'm not sorry, because you got three encores outta that, so."

"Okay," Scott says then, "it's time to reign it back in. How did you go from giving drunken encores to, fast forward to now, where you're willingly providing an intimate interview with Hollywood's Trainwreck, Scott Davis, whom you met in rehab?"

"Well--"

"Which, by the way," he claps his hands together, "I commend you for keeping not one, but two, rehab stints out of the press."

I chuckle. "Yeah...It was really, really fucking hard. It was like a Navy Seal operation. And I know people were drumming up the rumor mill when I stopped that 2018 tour--"

"Oh yeah. Especially when this pic surfaced--here, show Orion."

I look over through my glasses. In fact, I strictly wear my glasses now. The tech guy is holding up the tablet again, along with another guy holding up another. One is our feed, with a small picture in the bottom right hand corner again. The other tablet is just the picture.

The picture is of myself and Tristan in the airport. When I signed what's-her-faces stuff. In it, Tristan talks to me with his hand on my knee.

Tristan.

Fuck.

"Oh, yeah," I croak out. I clear my throat. "I looked like a fucking train wreck in that picture...That was me going home, actually, after my first rehab stint. I was better there, believe it or not."

"Who's the guy? I see Ben and Jake, but no one knew who the guy was. Was he your sponsor, or--"

"He was my boyfriend at the time."

There's stunned silence. Scott laughs. "I'm--I'm sorry. Boyfriend?"

"Yeah," I say, narrowing my eyes just ever so slightly.

He shrugs. "Didn't know." He then grins at the camera. "Surprise! I didn't even know that!"

I shrug. "Never came up before."

He grins. "You probably just made some of your male fans happy..."

I laugh. "Yeah, probably."

"Did he--what's his name?"

I cross my arms. "Look, something else that I've never opened up about is the fact that I had a stalker. I don't like giving out personal info on people that I know that aren't famous. You know--normal people."

"That's fa--wait, what?! You were stalked?! Bloody hell, Orion!"

I chuckle and shake my head.

"Anything else I don't know about you?"

I laugh and count off on my fingers, looking at the ceiling. "Uh, lets see--adoption, bisexual, stalker--" I look at him. "Nope! I think we're caught up now."

"So what happened with the stalker?"

"They caught her, luckily. It was--well, I'm not going to go into details. Something really really disturbing happened, and honestly it kinda is what led to me breaking up with the guy in the picture, in a very round about way...But anyway. So I had this stalker, and they caught her, and she's in jail. But after the trial I requested to see some of the evidence that convicted her...It was really screwed up."

"Yeah?"

"Turned out she lived down the block from me the entire time. It was really fucking disturbing--once I was allowed to find out who she was, I remembered her. She'd go jogging in the neighborhood all the time. She wasn't creepy at all. I remember her jogging past, wearing black leggings, a blue sports bra, hair up in a high ponytail, and listening to earbuds. And anytime I passed her I said hi, and she said hi, and that was it."

"That was it?"

"Yeah! And that's probably some of the most disturbing shit about all of it! She was normal. We'd say hi occasionally if I was out when she was jogging and that was it! I literally couldn't even tell you her name if you asked me."

"That's fucked."

"Yeah, especially when I saw the photos of her room, which was the main source of evidence. She had covered her entire bedroom with pictures of me. It was like something out of a movie. And some of them had hearts drawn on them, but some had my eyes crossed out, and just..." I shudder. "Yeah."

"Damn, I'm sorry you went through that."

"Yeah. So am I."

"So you said she was part of the reason you and your boyfriend broke up back then..."

I'm silent for a thoughtful moment. "Yeah, but really? That's just an excuse. I was a mess back then. I was severely, severely depressed. My depression had morphed into an eating disorder. I had been self-harming for years. And all the while I just...I pushed everyone away because I didn't want to drag anyone down with me. I didn't want to be a burden."

I shake my head. "I knew I was an alcoholic. I knew I didn't care about myself. I knew that I wasn't happy, and I just--I didn't want to admit any of that. Because running away from your problems is easier than fixing them, because when you fix them you have to be honest with yourself, and when you're honest with yourself, that's scary. So...I just pushed everyone away."

"And?"

I chuckle bitterly. "And it ended with me attempting suicide last year. I mean, let me clarify. It wasn't like I thought, 'I can't do this anymore'. It was, 'I have really bad insomnia, I haven't slept in a week straight, I need to sleep, so I'm going to take all these pills because I need sleep and if something happens, then oh well'."

"So, apathy."

"Yes! Yes." I point at him. "Complete and utter apathy towards my own well-being."

"And?"

"It was the worst and best decision I had made in my life all at once."

"What do you mean?"

"By that point I was an absolute wreck. My stalker was on trial and I was absolutely paranoid. I fell off the horse--I stopped going to AA, I stopped talking to my sponsor. I was--well, am--clinically depressed, and I stopped taking my meds. I swear I spent half the year of 2018 and most of 2019 crying. I couldn't control my emotions, at all. It was pathetic."

"Having emotions isn't pathetic," Scott corrects me, and I almost wince. We've discussed this in therapy ad nauseum.

"You're one hundred percent correct. What I mean to say is, my emotional instability should've been a red flag for myself. Instead I just trudged on like, 'Oh, nothing's wrong, I'm just an emotional guy!'."

I had stood up for that last part, dropped my voice low, and acted like I was walking somewhere, bobbing my head and moving my arms like I'm marching. Scott laughs.

"I mean, seriously. Have you read my lyrics?" I sit back down and run my hand through my hair again. I then look at my hand.

"Fuck! Seriously, I'm never wearing product in my hair again!"

He laughs.

I sigh. "Okay but seriously. So...yeah. I wasn't sleeping, I broke up with my boyfriend because I was angry that he found out I was drinking again, I started sleeping around, and then ended up in the hospital with one of my friends in jail because he gave me what I OD'd on."

"And then went into rehab?"

"Yeah, for my second time."

Scott grins. "Where we met!"

I smile faintly, interlacing my fingers. "Where we met."

"And the rest is history!"

I laugh. "Yeah, I guess..."

"Seriously though. About nine months ago you called me up."

I nod. "I did."

"And you told me you wanted to do this interview with me."

"Yup."

He cocks his head to the side. "Why? We've discussed a lot, but you never told me why. Why me?"

"Well, I couldn't think of anyone better to help me talk about this stuff than with--what did you refer to yourself as? Mr. Hollywood Train Wreck or something?"

He chortles. "Yeah, something like that."

"Well...Look."

I look at my lap and when I talk it's so quiet I hope the cameras can hear me.

"I'm a liar. I've been lying to myself ever since I was a teenager. I'm not okay. And I might never be okay. And admitting that is scary."

I lift my head.

"But I'm done running away. It doesn't help anything. Worse is it hurts people. And I've hurt a lot of people. And if I could take it all back, Lord knows I would. Sometimes I can't sleep and I just...ache. And I pray to God, I literally pray that I can just take back some nights, that I can just take back some words, but that's not how this works. I made my bed so I gotta sleep in it."

Scott smiles softly at me. I shake my head again.

"So yeah. I wanted to do this because it's not me being pretentious. It's not me trying to be a celebrity and say, 'Hey, I'm so much better than you all, look what I'm doing.' It's not about me. It's not about me at all.

"This is about everyone I screwed over to get here. This is about everyone who's emotions I've toyed with. This is about being that same kid in High School who just wants to make sure everyone around him isn't suffering.

"Because the truth is, I'm going to be okay. I'm always going to be okay. Sure I might screw up along the way, sure I might hurt people, really hurt those I truly love...But in the end I'm going to be here.

"And I don't want to just sit in my castle up on the hill and pretend this shit didn't happen to me. Because it did. And a lot of it I brought on myself, but some of it I didn't."

I look directly at the camera. "And I just want everyone who's watching this that--I see you. I hear you. You're not alone, okay? If you're a fan of mine, I want you to know I've read some of your letters.

"But I'm not going to sit here and lie to you either. I don't know what I'm supposed to do to make it better. So if I don't know that, then I can't help you. But I want you to know that you're not alone, and it's okay to lean on people sometimes."

I smile. "It's okay to not be okay sometimes. Don't pretend. Just be you."

"That's really beautiful, Orion."

I pause a moment and fight off the urge to cry. I then quickly roll my eyes. "Yeah, whatever. Cheesy, I know."

"But seriously--that's why you wanted me to do this?"

"Yeah," I say seriously. "I know you get it, and I needed the courage."

He grins. "Well. Anything else you'd like to say before we wrap this up?"

"Yeah!" I say excitedly, looking back at the camera. "If you're here in New York, and you're coming to my concert tonight, I have a special treat for you."

"Ooooo. Care to drop a hint?"

"No," I say, laughing, "because then I'll chicken out."

"Alright, anything else?"

I wave frantically at the camera. "HI AMY!!!!"

"Anything else?"

"Nope!"

"Alright. Well guys, thanks for joining us! This is Scott Davis--"

"And this is Orion Bauwens!" I shout, jumping off my chair and running at the camera with my arms outspread.

Scott laughs as I dive-bomb the camera. "And that's Orion Bauwens from Saturn Mutants--"

I crouched down in front of the camera so they couldn't see me. Then I stand up and blow on the camera, making it foggy. I wipe it off then and back up a bit, waving. "Bye!"

Scott comes up, wraps his arm around my neck, and sticks out his tongue, waving at the camera. "Bye!"