••Ink and Alchemy: Depths••

Before the first drink, there was already thirst—

a hollowness carved by hands I cannot name.

Some inherited. Some inflicted. Some my own.

I remember being twelve, staring at the ceiling,

feeling something vast and terrible taking root inside me—

a knowledge that the world was not made for souls like mine.

The needle finds the vein because the vein was waiting.

The bottle tilts because the throat was already open,

begging for something to burn away what couldn't be said.

In the eyes of strangers I became a walking diagnostic code.

In my own mirror: a creature born with backward skin,

nerve endings exposed to every passing breeze.

The soft parts of my mother's face hardened

each time I promised to stop—her hope calcifying

into something that looked like love but cut like glass.

I learned to die while still breathing.

Each morning a resurrection into hell.

Each night a surrender to oblivion's tender mercy.

I knew the weight of my child's head against my chest

and still chose the weightlessness of chemical grace—

this sin lives in my marrow, unforgivable, unforgotten.

Memory fractures around the things we cannot bear to witness.

The time she found me. The time he left. The time they called.

The time I woke in my own filth and recognized it as home.

In the psych ward, a woman with scarred arms told me,

"Your body remembers what your mind tries to forget."

I didn't understand until I tried to get clean.

Every cell screamed the history I'd tried to drown:

the "uncle's" wandering hands,

the schoolyard humiliations,

the pregnancy that ended in blood and silence,

the lover who said I was too much and not enough in the same breath,

the parent who drank before me, marking the path,

the God who never answered but never quite left either.

I began to write because my hands needed something to do

besides destroy. Simple as that.

The pen became a needle drawing poison instead of pushing it in.

The page received what no human could bear to hear.

First came the cataloging of wreckage:

The 4 a.m. walks to liquor stores with flickering signs.

The pills counted and recounted like rosary beads.

The faces of the men I let inside me when I couldn't stand being alone.

The sound of my son crying through a locked bathroom door.

I wrote until the pen tore through the paper.

Then I wrote on my skin when nothing else was left.

In detox, they tell you about triggers and coping mechanisms.

They don't tell you about the archeology of self,

how you must dig through layers of sediment and stone

to find what was buried alive.

They don't tell you that getting clean

is returning to the scene of the original crime—

whatever broke you before the drugs ever touched your lips.

Between the lines on yellow legal pads,

I found myself excavating not just addiction

but the cavity it had filled.

I wrote about the howling emptiness.

The cosmic loneliness no human touch could soothe.

The terror of being conscious in a meaningless universe.

The rage that had nowhere to go but inward.

In writing these unspeakable truths,

something shifted—not healed, not yet—

but shifted like tectonic plates beneath the ocean.

The shame that lived in me began to breathe differently,

no longer the desperate gasp of drowning

but the measured inhalation of a diver going deeper.

I learned that writing doesn't fix the broken places;

it illuminates them.

The light hurts at first, unbearable in its clarity,

revealing every crack and missing piece.

But in that same light, I could finally see

that what I thought was weakness

was the body's desperate intelligence.

The addiction was trying to save me,

in its way, from feelings that seemed unsurvivable.

I wrote on my one-year sober anniversary:

"I am learning to survive what I thought would kill me."

Not just the withdrawal, but the original wounds,

the raw nerve endings finally exposed to air.

Now when I place pen to paper,

there is a ritual of transformation:

Each word a molecule rearranging itself.

Each sentence a compound changing state.

Each paragraph a transmutation of experience

into something that can be carried rather than dragged.

This is the deepest magic—not forgetting,

but remembering in a way that doesn't destroy.

Holding the horror and the wisdom together,

letting them steep like strange herbs in the same dark vessel.

My hands still shake sometimes when I write.

Phantom withdrawal from substances long gone,

or perhaps just the trembling that comes

from touching something true.

In the deepest part of night, I still hear the call—

not just for the drug, but for the disappearance it promised.

I answer now with ink instead of obliteration.

I stay. I write. I remain.

This is the alchemy at the bottom of the soul:

Finding that the darkness I ran from for so long

contains not just terror, but terrible beauty.

The void I tried to fill was also the womb of creation.

The silence I couldn't bear now births every word.

Every page I fill is both tombstone and cradle.

Every line a death and a birth.

The ink flows black as tar but catches light at certain angles—

obsidian, not emptiness.

A darkness that holds rather than consumes.

I am writing myself into existence

one trembling word at a time.