Addiction

Some people drink
to forget the world.

Some people swallow pills
to make the world softer around the edges.

But for some of us
the drugs don’t blur the pain
they sharpen it.

For me,
it was the uppers.

Layer by trembling layer I gave my soul to stimulants,
until the person underneath
was something that only resembled who I used to be

At first it feels holy.

Your mind becomes a cathedral of sparks
thoughts screaming through your skull
faster than language can hold them.

You feel chosen.
Like the universe has cracked your skull open
and poured electricity directly into your brain.

Sleep becomes an insult.
Food becomes irrelevant. The weight falls off.
The night becomes a laboratory
where you dissect your own consciousness
with shaking hands.

You call it clarity.

But something else is happening.

The drug isn’t making you more alive
it’s hollowing you out
so the current has somewhere to run.

Days pass.

Or maybe they don’t.
Time starts dissolving
like sugar in boiling water.

Your heart pounds so hard
it feels like it’s trying to escape
through your ribs.

Your jaw grinds and muscles twitch
until your teeth feel like gravel.

Your skin itches
with the unmistakable certainty
that something underneath it
is trying to get out.

You look in the mirror.

Your pupils are black pits.
Your face is a stranger
wearing your bones.

And the worst part
the truly unspeakable part

is that a piece of you
likes it.

Because the drug doesn’t just take your soul.

It teaches you
how to watch it being taken.

Night three.
Night four.
Night five.

Your brain starts whispering things.

Not voices exactly.
More like thoughts
that arrive wearing someone else’s fingerprints.

You become convinced
that if you just stay awake
a little longer
you’ll understand something.

Some terrible, cosmic truth
waiting on the other side of exhaustion.

But the truth never arrives.

Only paranoia.
Only the sound of your own blood
roaring in your ears
like distant machinery.

You start to feel hunted
by your own shadow.

You begin to realize
the drug has done something
irreversible:

It has shown you
what it feels like
to outrun your own humanity.

And now sobriety
feels like crawling back
into a body
that no longer fits.

Because somewhere
in those sleepless neon colored nights

the drug didn’t just steal time
or sleep
or sanity.

It stole the quiet part of you
that used to feel safe inside your own head.

And even after you stop

I fear maybe even years later

there are moments
when your mind begins to race again,
when the air in some stupid bar smells like chemicals and ghosts,
when your heart beats a little too fast,

and you feel it moving
deep in the dark corners of your brain

like an animal
that learned how to live there.

Not gone.

If you're lucky in recovery, it hibernates, waiting

For the door
to open
All it needs is one more time.