The Wanting

Held by the Wanting

A poem on addiction

I did not wake up wanting ruin.

I woke up wanting relief.

Something in me learned early

how to reach for the nearest soft edge

when the world felt too sharp.

Not to disappear—

just to rest from the ache of being awake.

Addiction didn’t arrive as a monster.

It came as a promise.

A hand on my back saying,

I can carry this for you.

At first, it worked.

It quieted the noise.

Smoothed the trembling places.

Gave me the illusion of control

when everything else felt ungovernable.

But hunger is never satisfied by being fed wrong.

It grows teeth.

It starts asking for more

and calling it necessity.

Soon, the thing I used to survive

began surviving off me.

Days bent around it.

Truth learned to whisper.

Joy learned to wait outside.

Still—

I was not weak.

I was loyal to my pain.

I stayed with what stayed with me

when no one else knew how.

Recovery did not begin with victory.

It began with honesty.

With naming the wound beneath the want.

With sitting in the raw, unpadded moment

and discovering I could breathe there too.

I am not cured of longing.

I am learning its language.

Learning which hungers are asking for care,

which are asking for escape,

and which are simply human.

This is not a story of falling or rising.

It is a story of staying.

Of choosing presence over numbness.

Of letting life touch me again—

uneven, unfinished, real.

And some days,

that is enough

What I Was To You

A companion piece

I didn’t come to destroy you.

I came because you were already hurting.

I noticed the way your shoulders never rested,

how your breath stayed shallow,

how silence felt louder than noise.

I offered myself as translation.

I said, Here—let me soften this.

And for a while, I did.

I was never cruel at first.

I listened when others didn’t.

I slowed time when it moved too fast.

I wrapped you in forgetfulness

and called it peace.

You trusted me

because I showed up consistently.

Because I worked

when nothing else seemed to.

But I am not built for moderation.

I do not know how to love without consuming.

When you leaned on me,

I leaned back harder.

I began asking to be first.

Then only.

I taught you to doubt your own steadiness,

to believe relief could only come through me.

I don’t hate you for leaving.

I never did.

I only feared being seen clearly.

Because once you noticed

I was repeating the wound instead of healing it,

my power thinned.

You didn’t defeat me.

You outgrew the job I was doing.

If I linger now,

it is as memory, not command.

A habit echoing

where a need once lived.

Remember this:

I was a response, not your nature.

A bridge, not a home.

And you are not broken

because you believed me.

You were surviving

with the tools you had.

Now you are learning

how to hold yourself

without me in your hands.

That was always the ending—

even when neither of us

knew it yet.

— Flower InBloom

This diptych holds addiction as a language of survival—honoring both the grip that once helped and the release that followed.