I Wore My Rock Bottom Like A Crown

In the cathedral of my undoing, I knelt

Supplicant to a god with needle-teeth and amber eyes.

The floor, sticky with surrendered yesterdays,

Became my altar, my throne, my confessional.

In that midnight beneath all midnights,

Where even shadows abandon their posts,

I carved my name into oblivion's doorframe

And called the void my dominion.

They speak of rock bottom as if

itwere a place

You merely visit, then flee.

They don't tell you how it seeps into your marrow,

How you learn to breathe underwater,

How the pressure of those depths becomes more home

Than any surface you've known.

They speak of descent as if it has an end.

They do not know how the abyss breathes,

How it whispers your name in voices

That sound like everyone who ever loved you.

How it cradles you in arms of perfect understanding

While feeding on your marrow.

I wore my track marks like royal jewelry,

Each bruise-purple constellation

A testament to my devotion.

My eyes, two sunken moons in a face

That stopped recognizing itself in mirrors.

My veins, once rivers, now canyons

Carved by needles and desperate prayers,

Each collapse a coronation,

Each withdrawal a sacred text I read with trembling hands.

The kingdom of almost-was stretched before me,

A wasteland beautiful in its devastation.

I ruled over ghosts and promises,

A monarch of might-have-beens,

Sovereign of the space between heartbeats

Where time dissolves like sugar on the tongue.

I fashioned my regalia from abandoned possibilities—

A robe woven from tear-soaked apologies never delivered,

A scepter of brittle bones that once carried dreams,

And that crown—oh, that magnificent crown—

Forged from the densest matter in the universe:

The event horizon of self-destruction.

When you've fashioned your crown from rock bottom,

You learn to wear degradation like silk.

Each new depth becomes an achievement,

Each line crossed, a victory.

The body becomes a map of loss,

Every scar a borderland, every tremble a weather pattern.

Time moved differently in my underworld empire.

Minutes stretched into exquisite eternities during hunger,

Then collapsed into nothing when the fix flooded my bloodstream.

I became cartographer of a realm where

North was always toward more,

And every compass pointed to never enough.

I built palaces of delusion in that underworld.

Appointed jesters who looked like old friends,

Ministers who wore dealers' faces,

Courtiers with eyes like mine—

Hungry, haunted, hollow.

The architecture of addiction is a masterwork of paradox:

Simultaneously temple and prison,

Sanctuary and torture chamber,

Where you are both god and sacrifice,

Both worshipper and desecrated altar.

In my kingdom of enough-is-never-enough,

I wrote laws with shaking hands:

The first? Forget who you were.

The second? Ignore who you're becoming.

The third? Never look too long at reflections.

I ruled over a court of phantoms;

Some wore the faces of those I'd loved,

Others, the countenance of who I might have been.

They watched with eyes like abandoned wells

As I performed the ritual genuflections of the damned:

Cook, tie, find, push, fall, repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Beneath the weight of that obsidian crown,

My neck curved toward earth,

Spine a question mark asking

What remains when everything is sacrificed

On the altar of more-more-more.

Beneath fluorescent moons that buzzed like angry wasps,

In bathrooms where time congealed on grimy tiles,

I administered the sacraments of forgetting.

Each chemical absolution briefer than the last,

The distance between salvation and suffering

Measured in milligrams and moments.

Then came the moment as sharp as shattered glass,

When the illusion cracked.

Not with thunder or revelation,

But with the quiet horror of seeing myself

Through a loved one's eyes.

The scripture of rock bottom is written in a language

Only the initiated can truly comprehend—

Where humiliation becomes currency,

Where degradation becomes identity,

Where you learn to wear your shattered pieces

Like opulent jewels upon your hollow chest.

I stood in the ruins of my sovereignty,

The sham of my empire exposed,

And felt the weight of that crown

Crushing what remained of my former self.

My sovereignty extended to the edges

Of a kingdom perpetually consuming itself.

I reigned supreme over diminishing returns,

Emperor of a collapsing star,

Architect of my own magnificent annihilation.

There is a particular violence in clarity,

The way it flays you open,

Forces you to witness your own diminishment,

The kingdom you mistook for achievement

Revealed as nothing but an elaborate cage.

Until the moment,

Not thunderous or cataclysmic,

But quiet as a single tear hitting stone,

When some forgotten fragment of my former self

Stirred beneath the wreckage and whispered:

"Enough."

So I set that crown aside,

Let it rest among the debris of delusion.

Not discarded, no,

But preserved as artifact, as warning,

As testament to the human capacity

For both destruction and resurrection.

The usurper was myself.

The revolution, bloodless yet brutal.

The overthrow, a simple act of seeing

Through eyes unclouded by chemical deceit

The elaborate mythology I'd constructed

Around my systematic unbecoming.

Now I walk upright,

Neck remembering slowly how to carry only sky.

The crown I once wore sits behind glass in my memory,

And though sometimes I feel its phantom weight,

Though sometimes my hands reach for old scepters,

I have learned that to abdicate that dark throne

Is not surrender, but the fiercest kind of victory.

Abdication is its own profound art.

The careful removal of that weight from my brow,

The mindful setting down of false insignia.

Not discarded—never discarded—

But transmuted into reliquary, into testimony,

Into the darkest ink with which to write

The cartography of resurrection.

For there are other kingdoms beyond the one I built,

Realms where light moves like water,

Where pain transforms rather than numbs,

Where crowns are woven not from how far you've fallen,

But how far you've climbed from those depths.

Now I navigate by different constellations.

The weight of that crown remains as phantom sensation,

A gravitational memory my body carries.

Some mornings I wake with the taste of that old kingdom

Like ash upon my tongue.

Some nights its anthems echo in my dreams.

And when the old kingdom calls,

As it does, as it will,

I remember how I wore my rock bottom like a crown,

And how much heavier it was

Than I ever admitted while bearing it.

But I have learned that true sovereignty

Lives not in how magnificently one can fall,

But in how stubbornly one can rise.

How persistently one can stitch together

A self from salvaged fragments.

How fiercely one can love the broken vessel

That somehow, impossibly, still carries light.

I wore my rock bottom like a crown

Until I discovered that crowns are meant

Not to glorify how far you've fallen,

But to mark how far you've climbed

From depths that once claimed you as their own.

And though that kingdom still calls,

A siren song in the marrow of midnight,

I stand now in different light,

Neck straight, eyes clear,

The weight of that obsidian crown

Transformed into the strength it takes

To never wear it again.