The Dealer In My Head

I didn’t have a drinking problem.
Alcohol was just background noise.

My problem
came in little bags,
little pills,
little lies I folded into my pocket
and told myself
“just this once.”

Drugs don’t kick your door down.

They knock politely.
Sit at your kitchen table.
Learn your name.

And then one day
they start answering to it.

I quit
the way people rip parasites out of their own skin,
bloody,
shaking,
half convinced the thing might take my heart with it.

Everyone said,
“give it time.”

Time.

Like time can wash chemicals out of a soul
that learned how to beg.

Thirty days clean
and my body felt like a crime scene.

Nerves screaming.
Bones buzzing.
Sleep running from me
like it knew I owed it money.

Ninety days
and the world still looked wrong.

Too sharp.
Too loud.
Like someone turned the lights on
in a room
I had spent years destroying in the dark.

A year clean
and people clap.

They clap.

Like sobriety is a miracle
instead of a knife fight
I wake up to every morning.

Because here’s the truth
nobody puts on the recovery posters:

You don’t beat drugs.

You amputate them.

And the problem with cutting something out of yourself
is realizing
how much of you
was wrapped around it.

See, the monster didn’t chase me.

It grew in my lungs.
Learned my laugh.
Memorized the shape of my excuses.

It knew exactly how to say:

“just one more.”

And the worst part?

Sometimes
I still miss it.

Not the wreckage.
Not the empty pockets
or the hollow faces in bathroom mirrors.

But that moment
right before the fall.

When the world went soft
and quiet
and nothing inside me
was screaming anymore.

Sobriety is waking up
every day
in the same body
that once tried to kill you.

It’s learning the sound
of your own footsteps
so you know
when the monster starts walking again.

And some nights
I lie awake wondering

if I actually killed it

or if it’s still here
somewhere in my bones

waiting patiently

for me
to forget

who the hell
I’m supposed to be without it.