An anniversary of sorts

So I’ve been clean for a year. That’s 365 days. You need to be here, I said at the time. I was on it for twelve months, at least, or maybe it was much longer. You remember the exact day and time you put an end to it but you never really know when it all began, kinda creeps up on you. You need to be here, I said again. But he said, Don’t worry about it, you know, lets you know you’re alive, and hey, I’m not an arsehole. Fuck that, I said, I just need someone to hold my hand okay, please don’t make it harder than it already is. So he came looking for me in a hut with a rickety staircase, and stayed with me while I erased every last trace. Afterwards he kept me company for six hours and eighteen minutes, dragging me all over Chicago. He said he enjoyed talking to me too much to let me go, and he felt proud of me, he saw it sucking the life out of me. What a fucking cliché, I thought, but didn’t say. He took me to his mother’s house, right at the end of a cul-de-sac. His mother wasn’t there anymore, or maybe she was, I don’t really remember, and he made green tea in a microwave.

Stop

Thirteen, they said, it keeps growing in the corner of my desktop. No sooner will it fade than they will place it on an inkstone chiselled with sharpened metal, and with the palm of their hand will smash it, pound it, grind it, scorching with ultraviolet light. Can’t it stay that way, can’t they leave it alone. Stop feeding, stop holding, stop loving, stop trying so fucking hard, or it will keep growing, and I don’t want to be the one to tell it, to bend it, to mend it, to fend it, only to find it upending, depending, find yourself defending, fucking codepending ... codependence ... Who fucking said? There is no comfort in it. Stop pretending, stop looking at me, stop looking at me with your dark hollow eyes, an alien life form, I don’t want you guessing, knowing, smelling the core of me, stop it, stop, get your own fucking pain, a hammer, a mirror and your own three-inch nail.