Sobriety, refuted.
In the uber home, I feel empty.
I started the morning with half a month sober.
I broke it.
And for what? A dizzy head and shaking hands?
I curl into myself in bed with a sigh that tastes like hazlenut liquor and nicotine,
and feel weak. Feel sick.
I felt the sickness the first shot and puff I took— but I continued on. And now I lay in bed at half past three in the morning, trembling relentlessly, and feeling like it will never end.
As I sit here
As I sit here, my hands tremble. Did I make the right decision?
The feeling is not unlike the trauma one might feel when passing by the site of an old tragedy—an accident, a loss, a betrayal. That place, etched into memory, holds the power to shake you to your core, just as trust, once broken, becomes so difficult to rebuild.
I wonder if I’ll ever accept what happened to me and move on. I’ve been told countless times not to let the weight of the past dictate the course of my life. I’ve even quoted those very words: The situations we face should not become excuses for standing still.
But is it truly just an excuse? Or is it the reality of scars that refuse to fade, of a heart that still aches despite the passage of time?
I’ve come to believe that life is like a triangle, with three sides: spiritual, emotional, and physical. If one side falters, the triangle collapses, leaving life incomplete. Like the traditional three stones used to support a cooking pot, all must work together—remove one, and the pot cannot balance.
Sometimes, I feel like my triangle is cracked. My spiritual side is weighed down by questions I cannot answer, my emotions are tangled in a web of pain and uncertainty, and my physical self bears the toll of sleepless nights and endless worry. I try to rebuild, but the cracks seem too wide, the pieces too fragile.
And yet, there’s a small voice within me that whispers: You are still here. You have not given up. Perhaps life doesn’t demand perfection, but persistence. Perhaps the broken triangle can still hold together, even if it isn’t flawless.
And so, I sit here, facing the question that refuses to let me go:
Can my life ever feel whole again? Can I truly function while carrying the weight of my past?
Maybe the answer isn’t found in forgetting but in learning to carry it differently—in finding strength not despite the cracks, but because of them.
The Butcher Of Colours
I am painted eclipse black
My soul’s paling colours
Sucked, swilled and spat
In a bloodletting coup
Scarlet letter inked
In brushfire cheeked shame
This heady thirst and wretched hunt for light
Martyring sallow sheeted flesh
Like droughty dandelion beds
Matchless against a slaying sun,
The butcher of colours
Executes a swivel-eyed stampede
Evicting coma drunken wishes
And shaken stowaway dreams
Dragging my wilted anemone feet
Through the salt eaten corpse
Of bedeviled black seas
To pickle this imprisoned skin
In mummified reptilian sheath,
And I am bruised and slit necked reed
Swaying through opiate hushed calm
Singing the piper’s death march hymns
Beneath a hanging noose moon
Over ivory legged cloud,
Yet I have eaten up nightshade’s bitter spillover fill
And toasted my ghosts a vagrant’s farewell
And I will devour the towers of hooked black vulture rains
To steal back my colours
From death’s blitzkrieg of fangs.
Scattered
I once dated a man who was obsessed with the song Ave Maria. It should have been the first and last red flag. But true to form I churned the image of him into art. Something deeper than he was. Which is where my story begins. And dies. Just does my hope for love, everlasting. I think, sometimes, that I have given up, or perhaps I never started. Not really. Pipe dreams and unrealistic fantasies borne from fiction and make-believe—but only it was my imagination, she said. High for just a scream. I sit here now, sound— bottle: half empty; memoir: unwritten. What a failed fatale I have been unto myself yet alone to others. Echo alone, alone. Gone, gone she blows lost drawn by the wind, dust begotten is the now. Mist under sun. Breeze-sneezed. Scattered and strewn. And missed.
If
If I could wrap
Each part
Of my body
Around you
And hold you tight
Forever
I would hate myself
For keeping you
From the world
If I could cook
A meal
To equal
The feast
That is our love
I would hate myself
For allowing gluttony
Into our lives
If I could
Hear
Our beating hearts
The synchronicity
Of a moment
I might
Remember
A from z
Or maybe
I’d remember
What is
To be
Me
And that sometimes
It’s everything
That equals nothing
And nothing
That equals
Everything