A Boy Who Lost Himself To Drugs -

They never did.

That boy does not exist anymore.

He lost himself so completely that eventually, he stopped looking for the person he used to be. The boy who wanted to be a poet died a quiet death, not with a bang but with a surrendered sigh. In his place was a stranger: hollow-eyed, twitching, capable of things the seventh-grade Liam would have found monstrous. He sold his mother’s jewelry. He forged checks. He sat on curbs in the rain, waiting for a dealer who was two hours late, and he did not wonder anymore what his life was supposed to look like. a boy who lost himself to drugs

By sophomore year, the meteorology charts were rolled up and shoved in the back of a closet. The telescope his grandparents gave him for his birthday sat in the garage, its lens cracked. Liam’s new collection was more efficient: empty pill bottles, crumpled foil, a roster of phone numbers for people who would never ask how he was doing, only what he had. He lost weight, then more weight. His skin took on the pale, translucent quality of something that lives under a rock. The light in his eyes did not go out. It was replaced by something else: a constant, frantic calculation. Where is the next one coming from? How much money is left in my wallet? Who owes me a favor? They never did

And that was the trap. Liam had not started using to get high. He started using to get low—to turn down the volume on a brain that never stopped thinking, to quiet a heart that felt things too deeply. The drugs did not steal his soul in a single dramatic night. They borrowed it, a little at a time, promising always to give it back. The boy who wanted to be a poet

And somewhere, in a middle school somewhere in America, there is another boy with clear eyes and a working volcano. He has no idea that the path he is on is not paved with poor choices but with pain, with loneliness, with a pill that promises to make everything better. He does not know that the road to losing yourself is not marked by villains and needles, but by the quiet, seductive whisper of relief.