I was eleven
when I learned the burn of vodka
could quiet the voice in my head,
the one that kept asking
why am I still here?

I drank from a water bottle filled with Bicardi
in the back of 8th grade history,
and the teacher’s words became
white noise I floated in.

No one asked.
Or maybe I laughed too loud,
answered too quick,
wore my skin like armor,
and they mistook it for
confidence.

I was thirteen
when I passed out in my friend’s bed,
surrounded by people I knew,
but too many I didn’t.
My head a carousel of lights and music,
everything spinning
except for the truth:
I didn’t know how to feel without it.

The nights got longer,
the mornings became too bright,
too cruel to face.
I’d wake with a mind of betrayal
and a body of absence,
my phone full of things I couldn’t remember
saying or doing.

There was a boy
who said he loved me when I was wrecked,
and I was just soft enough to
mistake attention for affection.
He passed me the bottle
like a sacrament,
and I drank like I believed.

I was fourteen
when I blacked out at my own birthday party,
woke up with makeup smeared
and a room full of friends who
somehow didn’t realize.

I told myself
I was just wild,
just young.
But I knew
that I drank to disappear,
not to celebrate.

I was fourteen
when my mother
caught me drunk,
she didn’t cry,
just looked at me like I was a mirror
she didn’t want to recognize.

There’s no romantic tragedy in this,
no glamour in shaking hands
or bloodshot eyes
or friends who stop calling
because you’re always
too much or not enough.

I was fifteen
when I woke up
on the floor of my bathroom,
where I realized
this was a cage that I had built
with my own hands,
each shot a bar
and each lie a lock.

The drinking didn’t stop then,
but I saw it:
the ache under the thirst.
And maybe that’s what this poem is,
a hand stretched out
to that version of me,
offering the things
I had never before been given.