Moss and Mushrooms

Christmas kids

The title of this chapter is inspired by the song "Christmas kids" by roar. A vent chapter.
TW: SA, depression and substances

It is not beautiful
There is not a drop of beauty in my suffering.
My suffering made me walk over dead bodies and carelessly leave bloody footprints everywhere I went.
My pain made me unkind and spiteful, my pain made me ugly.
My pain did not teach me, my pain did not make me into a better person, my pain made me rot.
There is no meaning in the suffering.
There is no meaning in not caring if you're going to die tonight, there is no meaning in having vomit come out of your nose, there is no meaning in seeing yourself and the world as bitter and bleak.
The moments that make me into the man I want to be have been the happy moments, the moments in which everything was as it should be.
I am the days spent at the beach with my family, the days that filled me with hope because maybe this will be the time that I finally get it.
I am the day I received my first printed poetry book, the day I finally finished something I started, the day I held it in my hands.
I am the moment I got my seven month sober chip, I am the moment I shared with the man who gave me it.
I am the space shared with me and my older sister, I am the conversations we had.

I'm not yours
Everything was given up in the process of acquiring something to change the way I felt.
Every emotion was something soon followed by something to change it.
It felt like a divine sacrifice, I give everything of myself for this, I pray on my knees in a church for this.
This is what I am. This is all I am.
I'll step over dead bodies and wear my blood soaked shoes everywhere I go.
It felt crippling to be so defined by these things, these awful things that I didn't want to be, but I could not let it go.
But there will come a time for all addicts that you either let go or you die.
You try to find your way out of this, to be something more, or you find your spirit watching over your own casket.
Letting go of it all felt like losing a part of myself I was not ready to depart with. What was I without you?
But I had some semblance of an idea of the path that was ahead of me. I knew that this was not the life I wanted.
I did not want to become my pain and die young, I did not want to die before I ever became anything.
This is not what you want. This is not a life worth living.
I write goodbye letters to drugs every day. I pray to god to help me get through this moment without relapsing. I constantly remind myself of why I should not go back.
I retell the stories of all the bad that came with it.
I do anything I can to not be defined by my addiction.

Familiar ache
It's a familiar sort of ache I can't seem to remove myself from.
I wake up and I am already ready to go back to sleep.
I miss getting high but I won't because that makes too much of a mess.
I pretend that I am in a state I am not because there's no point in talking about it anymore.
I think about what happened, I dream about what happened, I digest the things that happened.
I stare at a screen from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. My life lives in them.
I have the same conversations over and over again.
I write the same poems using the same metaphors about the same topics.
I wonder if I ever get out of this in a way that is real, in a way that is not made of plastic.

I'll know
I don't want this to be me.
I cannot be defined by my pain.
I don't want to be the man who was never really happy, who is bound by a past he should be over by now, who carries a weight that he can't ever seem to put down.
I want to be happy, I want to write poems about the sunlight hitting my skin, I want to write about finding my peace, I want to write honestly about getting better.
I leave a bad taste in my mouth. Always unhappy or fearful or discontent.
I am tired of talking about being depressed, I'm tired of talking about missing the drugs and the awful things that happened on those nights.
What else is there to say?
How many ways could I say it? I ruined my spirit with the drugs. The rape tore me in half. I am rarely happy and am never happy for long.
I carry this with me wherever I go. I am unsure how to be anything else.