There are nights when your hands just need to hold something that promises silence.
Not love. Not clarity. Just stillness in a glass.
You tell yourself it helps you think, helps you stop thinking, helps you stop feeling the split between the two.
At first it is mercy. Then it becomes habit. Then it becomes a leash.
You stop drinking it for the taste. You drink it for the pause that lives between sips.
You drink it for the version of you that talks slower, feels less, forgets enough to sleep.
People call it coping. You call it control.
You call it keeping yourself manageable.
But deep down you know it’s a slow trade. A life pawned one swallow at a time.
Some nights you watch your reflection in the bottle instead of the mirror.
You like that person better.
They shimmer, they blur, they disappear on command.
You think that’s freedom. It’s not. It’s vanishing practiced to perfection.
Then one night you pour a glass of water instead, and it feels like betrayal.
Your hands shake like they’re missing a friend that never deserved the name.
You drink it anyway. It tastes thin and holy.
You hate it. You need it. You keep drinking.
Now you keep mugs, bottles, cans that do not lie to you.
Coffee that makes your chest hurt in the right way.
Water that doesn’t ask forgiveness.
Tea that goes cold while you’re busy living.
Sometimes you still want the burn, not the drink; the heat that scrubs you out from the inside.
You remember it like an old religion.
But you also remember waking up.
You remember breathing through the ache.
And you remember that staying is harder, but it’s real.
So you lift the glass, clear this time, and it trembles.
You drink. You taste nothing.
You stay.
Ghosts of the Navigator 