a toe tag

life and death

From a child regarded as highly intelligent,
from a reasonably happy home,
to an addict, an alcoholic,
by age fifteen.

My whole life became
one long binge,
a slow-motion car crash
I kept climbing back into.
Somehow, in the middle of that wreckage,
I still managed to build things:

a fine career as a professional chef,
feeding people while I starved myself
of any real peace.
A body that could carry me
through miles as a triathlete,
even as my soul could barely crawl.
Small bright trophies
lined up on a shelf
in a burning house.

But there were many, many lows.
A failed marriage
I watched crumble in my own hands.
Job losses that felt
like proof I was rotten at the core.
Toxic relationships
where I kept choosing the fire
and calling it warmth.
My failure as a father
echoing in the quiet
where my kids should have been.

I could never put
my full heart
into anything I did.
It was always addiction first,
like a god I hated
but still worshiped.

Every thought,
every decision,
fueled by the need
to shut myself off.
I learned to accept the pain and hurt
as my normal,
a kind of private hell
I decorated and called home.

My self-hate
and warped thinking
drove me into a hospital bed,
dying of liver failure.
Machines breathing for me,
strangers watching the clock,
while my body paid the bill
my choices had been running up for years.

The trauma I inflicted on myself,
the almost-ending,
the brutal drag of recovery—

and then I was spat back
into this world
as a grown man
with the emotional skills
of a fourteen-year-old,

walking through my own life
like an impostor in a borrowed body.

Now I haunt my days
wearing my own name
like a tag on a toe.
People say they’re proud of me,
call me strong,
call me survivor.
I’ve learned how to nod,
how to say “thank you,”
but inside there’s a voice that whispers:

If you knew how empty I feel,
would you still clap?

Who am I
without the drink,
without the chaos,
without the constant emergency
of my own destruction?

I know the man I was
when I was dying.
I knew him too well.
I don’t yet know the man
who is supposed to live.

So I move through my days
like a stranger in my own skin,
heart a locked room
I’m scared to enter,
learning how to feel a feeling
without turning it into
another kind of wound,

trying to trust a future
that still looks like a hallway
with the lights turned off.

Somewhere between the boy I was
and the ghost I almost became,
they tell me there is a man
I haven’t met yet.

On my worst nights,
I’m not sure he exists.
On my better ones,
I keep walking anyway,
through the shards and shadows,
hoping one day
I’ll look in the mirror
and finally recognize
the stranger staring back.