There’s something in these walls.
It fills every silent moment with shudders, and tremors, and quakes as it takes every truth with its tiny grasping hands and hides it in the corners of mothy closets and empty drawers and empty sores were memories should have been.

Where you should have been.

I didn’t tell mom when you got shot. When you came home and your forehead was hot and you begged me for some blow or dro or something to please make it go away.

Far away.

I didn’t tell her when I first knew that your veins contained more pain, blame, and heroin, than blood.

Sometimes I sit in your empty room with its walls as my guilty conscience, whispering in never-ending flows like waterfalls, and I wonder what went wrong.

I remember times when I’d hear you come home at night, your nose bleeding, your eyes tearing and bloodshot.

You’d say it’s alright. Just a fight.

But it’s okay, I get it. Cocaine takes the pain away. The shame away, it turns the love into mud, the hate into mud, it blurs the edges. But the pill that alleges to turn abyss into bliss only exists in your mind.

Drunken words are sober thoughts and I’ve fought this long enough.

You can take those bottles all you want but take this, I’m not going to TAKE this, anymore.