Nobody tells you how easy it is to disappear in the space between lockers and liquor stores, how silence tastes like cherry cough syrup and cheap vodka stolen from your parent’s cabinet. I was fifteen, but my liver seemed older than the rest of me. The bottle was a friend with no expectations, no glances, no questions about why I never smiled in photos anymore. Every hallway echoed, not with footsteps, but with slurred thoughts, and the sound of my own breath betraying me as I tried not to throw up in math class. Teachers called me lazy, said I could be something if I tried— but i was already someone, a ghost with a heartbeat, haunting my own skin. My friends started disappearing, or maybe I did. Either way, the nights got quieter, except for the music in my ears that played on repeat, and the clink of bottles under my bed. Mom thought I was just tired. And I was. Tired. but not from school, not from chores. But tired from pretending I wasn’t falling apart in a slow, beautiful collapse of dizziness and detachment. They say youth is a gift. I opened mine and found a hole I couldn’t climb out of, only drink deeper into. And somewhere inside me, a child still cries for a childhood I drank away.