We've Got This

You move away from home and find yourself 7000 miles away, it's not actually as hard as you think. You find a strength in yourself that you didn't know you had and its light can't be burnt out but 43 days in, it hits you. It hits you like a train that won't stop. It keeps heading towards you, steam escaping from its wheels, horn blowing and lights glaring. You try your best to stop it before it hits you but your ribs ache and you return to the bathroom floor; an old familiar habit that you thought you had seen the last of. Anything but this. You sigh as you feel its coldness against your skin.

The habits show themselves again, taking the opportunity to kick you when you're weak. The bathroom floor, the constant craving to sleep, that one song that was the soundtrack last time, the anger, the numbness, the desperation, the desire to be alone, losing enjoyment in the things that make you feel real, the calls to my sister late at night as she stays on the phone with me until I can breathe again.

It all comes back as if it had been waiting for the moment, as if the past year without it hasn't existed. You slip into a pattern of familiarity that you wish you didn't recognise. It welcomes you in too easily without much of a say. This can't become a pattern. It can't define the last of this year. Hell is a place that we all know but it can't become home. I won't let it.

I look down at the ring that reminds me of how far I've come and I realise that that defines me more than what could become of me if I accept familiarity. Sometimes its so exhausting to be strong but somebody has to be that for me and that is me, It shines brighter than everything else. I realise that I do refuse to sink.