I know the taste of glass in my throat better than I know the taste of clean air.
People say recovered like it’s a finish line, like I crossed something, like there was a ribbon and applause and a version of me that stayed behind, buried and obedient.
But recovery is not a place. It’s a hallway with no doors, just mirrors—and every reflection is a version of me holding something I promised I’d never touch again.
Lately, the mornings make me sick. Not metaphorically. Not poet-sick. I mean I wake up and the air—fresh, clean, good air—slides into my lungs like it doesn’t belong there. Like my body rejects it.
Like somewhere inside me there’s still a chemical blueprint that says: this is wrong. this is not what we breathe.
And I gag on sunlight. I sit on the edge of my bed and swallow down the urge to tear my own skin open just to find something familiar inside.
Nobody knows. God, that’s the worst part.
I’ve been asking around—casual, careless, like it’s a joke, like it’s nostalgia.
“Hey, you know anyone with xans?” “Anyone still selling molly?” “What about acid? Just curious.”
I say it like I’m laughing. I say it like I’m not counting the seconds between my heartbeat and the next bad decision.
I text numbers I swore I deleted. I scroll old contacts like I’m looking for ghosts who might still pick up.
I dig through conversations like a grave robber hoping one of them is still alive enough to poison me.
I tell myself I’m just checking. Just seeing what’s out there. Just making sure I could if I wanted to. But that’s the lie, isn’t it?
Because I don’t want options. I want inevitability.
I want the moment where it stops being a choice and starts being gravity.
My friends—they see it. I know they do. They see the way I tap my foot like there’s a countdown inside me. They see how I disappear mid-conversation, how my eyes go somewhere else entirely.
They see me scratching at my arms like there’s something underneath trying to get out. But they laugh. They always laugh.
“That’s just him.” “He’s always been like that.” “Addict brain, you know?”
Like it’s a personality trait. Like it’s a quirk.
Like I’m not standing on the edge of something that has already swallowed me once and is patient enough to do it again.
I want to grab them by the shoulders. I want to shake them until their teeth rattle.
I want to scream: this is not a joke. this is not a phase. this is not me being me.
This is me coming apart as loud as possible.
And my love—God. Her.
She is everything constant in my life. The only thing that doesn’t flicker. The only person who stays when my mind starts eating itself alive.
I talk to her about everything. Every stupid thought, every passing moment, every fragment of my day—except this. Except the thing that matters most.
Because somehow she doesn’t see it. She looks at me like I’m whole. Like I’m okay. Like the version of me she loves isn’t cracking down the middle right in front of her.
And I don’t know what hurts more—the fact that I’m hiding it, or the fact that I’m not hiding it well enough for it to be invisible, and she still doesn’t notice.
I sit next to her sometimes and I think: if I relapsed right now, if I disappeared into that version of myself again, how long would it take her to realize?
Would she notice the shift in my voice? The way my hands stop shaking for all the wrong reasons?
Would she see the absence before she sees the cause?
Or would I fade out slowly, like background noise, until there’s nothing left of me but explanations?
I want her to ask me. Just once. Not “Are you okay?”—that’s too easy to lie to. I want: “What are you not telling me?”
I want her to look at me like she knows something’s wrong even if she can’t name it. I want to be seen so badly it feels like it might kill me.
Because I am not okay.
I am standing in the middle of my own life with a map that leads backwards. I am remembering things my body should have forgotten.
The way it felt when everything went quiet. When the noise in my head finally shut up.
When I didn’t have to feel every second like it was pressing into me too hard.
I don’t miss the destruction. I miss the silence. And that’s the most dangerous part.
Because silence is a liar. It tells you you’re safe while it’s erasing you.
Seventeen, and I already know how easy it would be to disappear.
How quickly I could trade this suffocating clarity for something softer, something duller, something that doesn’t ask me to survive myself every day.
I wish someone would notice. I wish someone would say: “You’re slipping.”
I wish someone would call it what it is before I do.
Because if I say it out loud it becomes real. And if it becomes real, I might have to fight it. And I don’t know if I have it in me to win again.
So instead, I breathe. Even when it makes me sick. Even when the air feels wrong. Even when every part of me is screaming for something else.
I breathe like it’s the only thing keeping me from going back. Because right now—it is.


















