Dear Addiction,

You didn't knock.

You slipped in through the cracks I pretended weren't there. You sounded like mercy when I was exhausted, like silence when my mind was too loud to live in. I trusted you because I needed something to hold me together.

You didn't save me. You replaced me.

You taught me how to disappear while still breathing. You hollowed me out carefully, traded my values for survival, my pride for numbness. I woke up one day wearing choices that didn't feel like mine, carrying shame so heavy it bent my spine. My body remembers things my mouth will never say.

You turned my reflection into a crime scene.

I stopped seeing a person and started seeing proof. Proof that I could be broken down, rewritten, owned. You trained me to hate myself just enough to stay. I became smaller, quieter, afraid of my own thoughts. I learned how to exist without taking up space.

You were never just a habit.

You were a slow execution.

You told me I was already ruined, so there was no point in leaving. You told me hope was a lie people like me didn't deserve. You buried my name under guilt and called it truth. You erased the version of me that still believed life could feel clean.

Now I live in the aftermath.

I walk, I talk, I breathe, but the person I was did not survive you. There are empty rooms inside me where something vital used to live. I carry memories like headstones and grief for a self no one else remembers.

You didn't take my life.

You took me.

And what's left is only the echo,

Trying to live with the death of someone who died

While everyone else thinks I made it out alive.