Habits

I remember good-old days gone by when life was stable

and life was short,

and all I had to fear was doing lines off girls I used to know,

shooting their fears and insecurities into my veins,

each personality a new drug I'd never tried,

each smokey inhale a new moan I'd yet to capture.

I remember when I said I'd found the blades on a sidewalk someday,

as if making off like that was any better than stealing from a classroom,

as if passing my habits up as habitual was any better than the truth.

I was addicted.

Not to getting high and not to collecting names;

I was addicted to destruction,

addicted to every time a new "me" dissolved

in place of an old;

there WAS no "me" by the time the weed kicked in.

I was addicted to forgetting,

to scrubbing off names and personalities from my skin like bad bath salts.

I'd dabbed and blazed with the best of them,

turning my insides to ashy tombs,

turning my lungs to the entranceway to a psychological cemetery I could never escape from.

I burned.

I sank.

I drowned.

Miles of heroin oceans kept me under like waves on a riverbank,

reminding me of days I should have drowned -

I should've jumped -

I should've died,

if only to spare you the pain of handling relapses spent sobbing under bedroom pillows.

Our pillow-talk consisted of you begging me not to do it,

and stupid me couldn't tell the difference between "no" and "yes"

and I sank and I sank and I -

Lived.

But it wasn't quite living.

My brain was a shell no snail wanted solace in;

Even shellfish knew better than to scavenge in my ocular caves.

There was nothing left for them,

just snowy remains of a past I once had but now misplaced.

All the pearls were glass shards in disguise and I shattered

under their weight.

I scrambled for driftwood in a stoney haze,

all the while forgetting what it felt like to say my own name.

Also available on my writing tumblr