I was eleven when I learned the burn of vodka could quiet the voice in my head, the one that kept asking why am I still here? I drank from a water bottle filled with Bicardi in the back of 8th grade history, and the teacher’s words became white noise I floated in. No one asked. Or maybe I laughed too loud, answered too quick, wore my skin like armor, and they mistook it for confidence. I was thirteen when I passed out in my friend’s bed, surrounded by people I knew, but too many I didn’t. My head a carousel of lights and music, everything spinning except for the truth: I didn’t know how to feel without it. The nights got longer, the mornings became too bright, too cruel to face. I’d wake with a mind of betrayal and a body of absence, my phone full of things I couldn’t remember saying or doing. There was a boy who said he loved me when I was wrecked, and I was just soft enough to mistake attention for affection. He passed me the bottle like a sacrament, and I drank like I believed. I was fourteen when I blacked out at my own birthday party, woke up with makeup smeared and a room full of friends who somehow didn’t realize. I told myself I was just wild, just young. But I knew that I drank to disappear, not to celebrate. I was fourteen when my mother caught me drunk, she didn’t cry, just looked at me like I was a mirror she didn’t want to recognize. I was fifteen when I woke up on the floor of my bathroom, where I realized this was a cage that I had built with my own hands, each shot a bar and each lie a lock. The drinking didn’t stop then, but I saw it: the ache under the thirst. And maybe that’s what this poem is, a hand stretched out to that version of me, offering the help I never got.