Captivated

I lived like smoke—here, then gone, drifting without form, leaving behind nothing but the smell of ash and wasted nights. Cigarettes became my heartbeat, a slow burn down to the filter, each one lit from the dying glow of the last. My lungs were a furnace, filled with fire and poison, and sometimes I wondered if they’d just give out so I wouldn’t have to.

Alcohol was the other half of me. Bitter, sharp, always burning. A cure that never cured. I drank until the world blurred, until the silence in my head felt like a scream muffled underwater. I wasn’t searching for fun or freedom. I was searching for numbness. And most nights, I found it.

My days had no beginning and no end. Hours bled together like spilled ink on wet paper, spreading until there was no difference between night and morning, today and yesterday. I existed in a cycle of noise and nothingness. Bars, alleys, parties I never cared about. People who came and went like smoke, too.

I called them friends, but they weren’t. They were just bodies standing close enough to make me feel less alone, just as broken as I was. We laughed too loudly at things that weren’t funny, fought when the silence became unbearable, and drowned ourselves in whatever would keep us awake, alive, or unconscious. They weren’t saving me. I wasn’t saving them. We were all just sinking together.

Money slipped through my hands like water, but I didn’t care. What use was it to plan for a future I couldn’t imagine? I spent it like I spent my nights—wastefully, recklessly, desperately. Rides to nowhere. Drinks I didn’t finish. Rooms I didn’t remember leaving. Every dollar gone felt like proof that tomorrow didn’t matter.

Home wasn’t any better. It wasn’t safe, it wasn’t warm—it was war. My parents and I fought like strangers forced into the same cage. Every conversation turned into a battlefield, voices raised until words became weapons. They wanted me to be someone else. I wanted them to leave me alone. Love was something that had lived there once, but it had died quietly, without a funeral, leaving only the bones of anger and disappointment.

I didn’t smile. I didn’t laugh. My face didn’t know how anymore. My body moved because it had to, but there was no soul left in it. I was just a shell, a shadow dragging itself through days without purpose. A dead body in disguise, waiting for nothing.

I didn’t dream. I didn’t hope. I didn’t believe in anything.

Every night I told myself I couldn’t sink lower, and every morning I found out I could.

That was who I was.

Empty. Restless. Lost.

Alive, but only by accident.