Beautiful Coffin

I still dream in powder wake up with my jaw clenched around ghosts. catch myself staring too long at the hollow-eyed man outside the gas station like he might hand me God wrapped in tinfoil. People think getting clean means the hunger dies. Like sobriety is a funeral. Like they buried her. Like the dirt settled. But addiction is a revenant. It scratches at the walls of your ribs with dirty fingernails. It remembers your name better than your mother does. Heroin loved me. Fentanyl loved me harder. That’s the ugliest truth. Not healthy love. Not gentle love. Not the kind that keeps you alive long enough to become a person. But it held me when no one else did. Wrapped around my veins like barbed wire pretending to be silk. I miss it in the morning most. Before the coffee. Before the sunlight has fully decided whether I deserve another day. I miss the ritual. The chase. The silence after the hit when every screaming thing inside me finally shut the fuck up. No grief. No fear. No memories chewing through my spine. Just warmth. Just nothing. God, I crave the nothing. People clap for clean time like it patches the hole. Like survival is the same thing as healing. But some days I am only a dog without a leash dragging itself past old corners trying not to remember the taste of oblivion. I still romanticize it. That’s the part nobody wants to hear. Recovery stories are supposed to sparkle. They want redemption arcs. Crying speeches. Coffee and cigarettes N and gratitude journals. They don’t want to hear that I would still crawl across broken glass for one more perfect numb second. That sometimes I mourn dope more deeply than I’ve mourned people. Because heroin never asked me to explain my pain. Never told me I was too much. Never looked afraid of my darkness. It just opened its arms and slowly killed me. And somehow even after the funerals, the overdoses, the Narcan, the nights my heart forgot its rhythm— some rotten part of me still whispers yes when I smell smoke and vinegar in the air. Still thinks maybe this time I could touch death without letting it keep me. But I stay clean anyway. Not because I stopped wanting it. Not because the craving got smaller. Not because I became wise or holy. I stay clean because I know exactly how beautiful the coffin looked the first time I climbed inside it.