The Eyes of An Addict
What I Saw, What I Survived
Hollowed galaxies
where stars once burned.
Black holes
devouring light.
Cosmic graveyards
where dreams go to die.
Eyes like shattered mirrors,
each fragment reflecting
a different kind of pain.
Cut yourself on the shards
if you dare look too long.
Windows nailed shut,
glass cracked beyond repair;
frost-bitten gardens
where nothing grows
but the thorny vines of need,
choking whatever warmth remains.
The outsider sees
only absence,
only void,
only the shipwreck
not the drowning sailor
with lungs half-filled,
still clawing toward surface,
still believing in air.
They whisper,
"Gone, gone, gone."
A eulogy for the breathing.
A funeral for the fighting.
Mother's hands reach
across impossible distance
fingers brush against
the cold observatory glass.
Their telescope captures
only celestial ghosts,
light from stars
long since collapsed.
She presses her forehead against the lens
until the metal leaves a mark,
a self-inflicted wound
to match the one inside.
"Return to me,"
they plead to the cosmos.
"I know you still orbit somewhere
beneath the asteroid field of your pain.
I know your heart still beats
beneath the rubble."
What lives in those distant pupils:
A soul handcuffed to hunger,
bruised wrists bleeding
from trying to break free,
voice hoarse from screaming
behind soundproof glass.
A prisoner who has forgotten
the crime and the sentence,
knows only the cell walls
and the shackle's bite.
The doctor measures dilation,
maps constellations of burst vessels,
charts the trajectory of falling.
Numbers. Predictions. Patterns.
Cold astronomy of decline.
Clinical distance that fails to measure
the supernova of suffering
contained in a single human frame.
But beneath the calculations:
A universe imploding,
galaxies of shame collapsing
into singularities so dense
not even memories escape.
The big bang in reverse
all that was expansive and bright
compressing into a point
of unbearable gravity.
Mirrors reflecting back
our own terror of dissolution.
Windows into the void
we pretend we cannot fall into.
Our nightmare made flesh,
the reminder that we all walk
a tightrope over the same abyss.
The addict's gaze;
A lighthouse beam extinguished,
the keeper still climbing the stairs
with matches that refuse to strike.
Still believing in light
even as darkness devours
every horizon.
Then
a spark.
Almost nothing.
A firefly in endless night.
The smallest defiance of darkness.
A match struck in hurricane winds
somehow, impossibly, stays lit.
Fellow travelers see it first,
recognize the guttering candle
they once kindled in themselves.
Their hands cup around yours,
shielding that first fragile flame
from the winds that still howl for extinction.
Raw terror unclouded.
Exhaustion deeper than marrow.
The final surrender that becomes
the first victory.
The raised white flag
that marks the beginning,
not the end, of the true battle.
"There," they whisper.
"The first light. Hold it gently.
Not too close or it will burn you.
Not too far or it will leave you.
Just here, in the palm of your trembling hand.
Just here."
Eyes that flinch from daylight,
newborn and terrified.
Every glance a battlefield,
every reflection an accusation.
Pupils adjusting painfully
to the unfiltered truth
of what was and what is.
They dart like hunted creatures,
scan like prey animals,
wear the thousand-yard stare
of soldiers back from war.
Hypervigilance;
the body still believing
it lives in enemy territory.
Reality: too sharp, too loud,
too merciless in its clarity.
Nerves exposed to open air,
skin peeled back to reveal
everything that must now be felt.
A symphony played at deafening volume
after years of cotton-wrapped silence.
But then
a moment of presence.
A laugh that rises from the belly,
not from chemical illusion.
Eyes that focus, hold, connect.
The shock of genuine feeling
that doesn't need to be dulled,
doesn't need to be escaped,
can simply be experienced and released
like a breath held too long underwater.
The moment empathy eclipses need
when another's pain matters more
than the endless internal scream.
You can see it unfold,
the first unfurling of a leaf
on a branch long thought dead.
The green miracle of care
growing from scorched earth.
Loved ones witness with caught breath,
hearts suspended between memory and hope.
They've collected false dawns
like children collect shells,
pocketfuls of broken promises.
They've learned to guard their hearts
behind walls of tempered expectation.
Yet something in this gaze
holds steady as a compass needle.
Something in this gaze
has found true north at last.
Something has shifted beneath the surface;
tectonic plates realigning
toward stability rather than destruction.
"There you are," they breathe,
afraid loud words might shatter
this delicate homecoming.
The prodigal self returning
to its rightful kingdom.
As days weave into weeks
into months into years,
the eyes transform.
Not all at once,
but in quantum leaps of clarity,
moments of vision so acute
they can never be unseen.
Where once they fled,
now they meet.
Where once they accused,
now they understand.
Where once they begged,
now they offer.
Where once they saw only wreckage,
now they perceive the outline
of something being built.
These eyes now hold
a world's worth of weather:
lightning strikes of past violence,
flood plains of grief,
drought years of isolation,
and finally
the slow greening after fire.
The phoenix forest that rises
more vibrant because it knows
the language of ash.
They carry the shadow lands
mapped in precise detail.
They carry the memory of falling.
They carry the wisdom of having crawled
inch by excruciating inch
back into the light.
They carry the sacred text
of their own resurrection,
written in scars that have healed
but will never disappear.
These eyes have learned
that clear vision,
though it burns like salt in wounds,
saves more than it costs.
That truth, though it flays you,
is kinder than the softest lies.
That seeing oneself completely,
both monster and child, wreckage and miracle,
is the only foundation
that cannot be washed away.
The bedrock beneath
the house rebuilt from ruins.
Polarities housed in single irises.
Death and birth sharing one cradle.
Heaven and hell viewed from the same summit.
The cataclysm and the creation myth
told by the same tongue.
These eyes have descended and ascended.
They've known how it feels when the self fractures,
and how it feels when the pieces rejoin,
never perfectly,
never without scars,
but whole enough to hold water,
whole enough to reflect sky.
Kintsugi vessels,
more beautiful for having been broken,
gold-veined with the story of repair.
They have watched the worst within rise up
and swallow everything.
They have chosen daily
to feed something better.
They have seen the demon
and the angel
use the same face,
speak with the same voice,
and learned to discern
which to follow.
These eyes see a sunrise
and know it's not guaranteed.
These eyes see joy
and don't take it for ransom.
These eyes have learned to witness pain
without turning away
or turning to stone.
These eyes know the value of light
by the measure of darkness endured.
They've stared into abysses
that stared back,
and in that terrible communion,
found the courage to blink first.
"How?" ask those who've never fallen so far.
"How did you rebuild from dust?
How did you find your way
when all maps showed only void?"
The answer lives in moments
thin as breath:
Sitting still when every cell screams Run.
Reaching out when shame commands Disappear.
Speaking truth when lies promise relief.
Choosing connection
over the false sanctuary of numbness.
Twenty-four hours.
Then twenty-four more.
The grand canyon of healing
carved by the humble river
of one more day.
It lives in the daily communion
with what is,
not what fear paints,
not what craving promises,
not what shame whispers in the dark.
The radical acceptance
that this moment,
however beautiful or brutal,
can be faced with open eyes.
This is the impossible paradox
shining in recovered eyes:
They've mapped hell's geography
yet believe in redemption's landscape.
They've tasted poison that promised paradise
yet trust that true healing exists.
They've known solitary confinement of soul
yet reflect back connection
luminous as dawn on still water.
They've been betrayed by their own minds
yet learned to trust themselves again.
To meet such a gaze
is to face our deepest questions:
Can the shattered become whole?
Can the lost find home?
Can darkness itself
become a teacher of light?
Can what was destroyed
be not merely rebuilt
but transformed into something
more authentic than before?
The steady eyes answer
in their silent eloquence:
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
A thousand times yes.
When we look into these eyes-
whether clouded by active suffering
or clear with hard-won peace-
we reveal ourselves in our seeing.
Do we recognize only the wasteland
or also the seeds beneath the snow?
Do we count only fallen bridges
or also new foundations being laid?
Do we see a story already written
or one still finding its true voice?
Do we focus on the wound
or on the healing?
These eyes offer us a mirror
reflecting our capacity:
to hold contradictions without breaking,
to witness suffering without turning away,
to believe in tomorrow
when today offers no evidence.
To see the full human beneath the label.
To recognize our own reflection
in another's struggle.
They remind us we are not monuments
carved in unchangeable stone,
but rivers finding new courses
through whatever terrain we're given.
Not static beings, but stories in motion.
Not diagnoses, but journeys.
These eyes urge us deeper
than the surface turbulence
to the current below:
our shared hunger for belonging,
our universal need for meaning,
our common language of broken hearts
learning to beat again.
The bedrock truth that no one
is beyond redemption's reach.
Most radically,
they offer living testimony
that the bottom of the world
can become a foundation,
that eyes which once reflected only night skies
can learn to hold constellations again;
not the innocent stars of childhood,
but the more magnificent patterns
visible only to those who've known
true darkness.
The gospel of second chances,
written in flesh and blood and tears.
When we truly witness recovery's gaze,
with all its earned wisdom
and honorable scars,
we glimpse our full human inheritance:
our capacity for destruction
and our gift for restoration,
our talent for falling
and our genius for rising,
our ancient knowledge of shadows
and our ever-renewed ability
to carry light.
In that sacred witnessing,
we recognize the undefeated spirit,
not pristine,
not untouched,
not innocent,
but something far more beautiful:
tested and still standing,
acquainted with night
and still choosing
to kindle fires,
still choosing
to sing.
Look closer now.
Past the surface shimmer.
Past the story you think you know.
In these eyes: entire universes reborn.
In these eyes: the big bang of becoming.
In these eyes: reformation at the atomic level.
No temple is more holy
than the body that houses
a soul returned from exile.
No miracle more profound
than consciousness choosing
again and again and again
to stay, to feel, to heal.
The addict in recovery
carries paradise and inferno
in balanced measure.
They've seen how quickly Eden falls.
They've learned how stubbornly
flowers push through concrete.
Their eyes reflect a radical hope:
not blind optimism,
but clear-eyed faith
forged in the furnace
of their own unmaking.
Hope with callused hands.
Hope that's cleaned its own vomit.
Hope that's sat in jail cells.
Hope that's lost everything
and still found reason
to rebuild from nothing.
These are prophet eyes.
They've seen apocalypse
and still believe in genesis.
They speak in tongues of fire
about what waits on the other side
of surrender.
They are lighthouses for the lost,
their scars illuminated beacons
saying both "Danger, rocks below"
and "This way home, this way home."
When such eyes meet yours,
do not look away.
When such eyes offer connection,
do not refuse the gift.
For in their depths swirls
the most human story of all:
How we fall.
How we rise.
How we break.
How we mend.
How the darkest night
gives way to dawn.
How even our deepest wounds
can become holy wells
from which others drink
and find themselves nourished.
And in this meeting of gazes,
the suffering and the healed,
the lost and the found,
the broken and the whole,
we recognize at last
the ancient truth:
We are all recovering from something.
We are all finding our way back to light.
We are all worthy of the journey.
We are all capable of transformation.
We are all both the wound and the healing.
We are all both the darkness and the dawn.
And in that recognition,
in that moment of seeing
and being truly seen,
something miraculous happens:
The circle closes.
The exile ends.
The prodigal returns.
And what once seemed impossible,
a life reclaimed from the ashes,
a self rebuilt from ruins,
a heart that dared to beat again
after nearly beating its last,
becomes not just possible
but present,
not just hoped for
but held,
not just dreamed of
but lived,
breath by precious breath,
day by sacred day,
one moment of clarity
at a time.
