Intoxicated by What Once Was

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People ask what substance I abuse. They expect something tangible — a bottle emptied in secret, a powder hidden between folded paper, smoke dissolving into the dark. They search for a name they can pronounce, a poison they can point to, convinced there must be something chemical behind the slow ruin of my mind.

But my addiction has never come with a warning label.

I abuse the past.

Each night, I return to it like a devoted addict. I sip from old conversations until their echoes drown out the present. I trace the outlines of vanished days, running my fingers across memories as though they might disappear if I stop touching them. I revisit doors that have long been closed, hoping they will open differently this time.

As if repetition could rewrite an ending.

They never do.

Still, I linger among the ruins.

I collect unfinished goodbyes, unanswered apologies, and the ghosts of people who no longer know my name. I carry them carefully, like relics from a life already buried, mistaking their weight for meaning.

Sometimes I tell myself I am searching for closure.

In truth, I am searching for another chance.

That is the cruelty of memory: the more often it is revisited, the less truth it contains.

Time softens the edges. Grief rearranges the details. What was once ordinary becomes sacred, and what was sacred becomes unbearable.

I no longer remember things as they were — I remember them as they wounded me.

The laughter becomes quieter. The silences become louder. The endings grow sharper than they ever were.

Yet I keep returning.

There is a strange comfort in familiar pain. A temptation in reopening old scars just to prove they still ache. I tell myself I am preserving what was lost, when in reality, I am only teaching myself how to live inside its absence.

“If I remember enough, perhaps I will lose less.”

That is the lie I tell myself.

So no, I do not drown myself in liquor, nor do I surrender to narcotics.

The substance that consumes me is far older than any drug. It lingers in photographs, in songs, in the silence between midnight and morning. It waits in the places where longing refuses to die.

In the end, I was never addicted to the memories themselves.

I was addicted to the possibility that they could become something other than what they are.

People ask what substance I abuse.

The answer has always been the same.

I am intoxicated by what no longer exists.