Cement Garden: Letters to an Addict
I have seen you before.
Not just in the shadowed spaces where your breath slows,
where your fingers shake,
where your heartbeat stumbles like a runner with nowhere left to go.
I have seen you in the cracks of my own hands,
in the places where I, too, once tried to bury myself
under the weight of what I had done.
You tell me I threw it all away.
That my life turned to dust in my palms
but you won’t look down at your own hands
to see the ashes slipping through your fingers.
You are drowning.
Not in water, not even in fire—
but in something thicker, something gray and heavy,
something that once promised to hold you together
but is now pulling you under.
Cement.
You thought it would make you solid,
that the numbness would be a foundation,
that if you could just stay still enough,
the world would stop breaking you apart.
But cement does not heal.
It does not warm.
It does not love.
It only hardens.
And now, you are a garden with roots encased in stone,
a body that still breathes but does not grow.
I could have left you coffee on the porch.
I could have stepped outside and handed you my warmth,
let it spill into your hands like a lifeline,
but I have poured too many cups for hands that never held on.
I have whispered too many words into the void,
hoping they would plant themselves in your chest
before you collapsed under your own weight.
I have bled for you,
for the version of you that still exists beneath the hunger,
beneath the stealing, beneath the lies,
beneath the quiet terror that keeps you shackled to the cold.
But I cannot dig you out.
I cannot break the stone with my bare hands.
I cannot make you drink warmth
when your lips are pressed to the mouth of something colder.
So I write you these letters.
I carve them into the concrete,
hoping one day, when the cracks grow deep enough,
when the weight becomes unbearable,
when the stone finally crumbles—
you will see them.
You will see that I was here.
That I have always been here.
That I saw you when you could not see yourself.
And maybe then,
you will take the first breath that does not taste like drowning.
Maybe then,
you will realize the garden was never dead—
only waiting for the rain.
Copyright ©
Evelyn Collins
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