The Distance I’ve Carried:

I come from the kind of dark that doesn’t disappear when somebody turns on the light.

The kind that follows you from room to room— quietly rearranging everything you thought you knew about yourself.

I have slept in cells, stood inside addiction and called it shelter. I have watched the people who loved me grow tired from holding hope I kept dropping.

My mother loved me through every version I couldn’t love— and now I speak to the sky like death is only distance and she might still be listening.

I have buried people without putting their memory in the ground. Some days, guilt knocks. Other days, it lets itself in.

But I’m still here— not clean like untouched glass, but sober like something broken that finally stopped pretending it wasn’t sharp.

Now I sit beside people who are still fighting the same shadows that once wore my face. I tell them there is a way out, even when I can still feel the entrance behind me.

Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe it makes me a map. I have children who have seen both the wreckage and the rebuilding.

A grandson who will hopefully only know my scars as stories— proof that his grandfather learned how to stay.

I write because my thoughts do not know how to stand in a straight line. They pace. They pull books from shelves, argue with ghosts and dissect every silence until even the quiet starts confessing.

I’ve mistaken intensity for love. I’ve handed my heart to people who studied it only to learn where it would break.

Still—

I believe in something that doesn’t leave when the weather changes. I believe a damaged man can become a safe place without denying the damage.

So if you ask me who I am—

I am every bad decision that failed to kill the better one.

I am grief with a pulse. A father still learning. A son still missing his mother. An addict who became the person he once needed to meet.

I am not the darkness I came from— but I would be lying if I said it doesn’t help me see.

And I don’t know whether my life is a warning or a poem.

Maybe it’s both.

Maybe I’m both.

But, it’s all me.