addiction
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the soft brown chair by the window, overlooking Fulton Street, holds me tonight.I come here most weeks for therapy, and for a little while, the world outside feels far away, almost like the air in here belongs only to me. my hands won’t stay still. my thoughts circle around themselves, heavy and jagged.depression and addiction…
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when summer comes to an end, it can feel to me like the world is ending, too. I know the other seasons have their beauty and their possibilities. but the earlier sunsets, the days getting shorter and darker: that’s always been a trouble trigger for me. it’s when the fear of relapsing, getting sick and…
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I live with a dual diagnosis: depression and substance use disorder. that’s the name for it. but what it feels like is living on a hinge: leaning toward one world, pulled by the other. one world is made of steady hands and gentle hearts. the soft echo of my mother’s voice from another room. abuela’s…
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waiting rooms have a strange gravity to them. this one knew more of me than I meant to share. maybe it lands somewhere close to you. waitINgRooM waiting for someone to call my name is an anxiety machine/music in my headphones’ the only thing keeping me slow/sitting on forms, back to the wall,/TV screen goes…
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sometimes people ask me what my songs are about. I usually say something vague —the city, life stuff, you know? — because the real answer feels too tangled to unwrap in small talk. the truth is, they’re personal. not metaphorical or abstract. they’re about Brooklyn. about skateboarding past street corners where dealers post up. about…
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last night, my mom went to her high school reunion. she stood in front of the mirror, adjusting the straps of her dress, tilting her head the way she does when she’s deciding if she still belongs in a room she hasn’t yet entered. she does. she always has. her Spanish beauty, unchanged. the same…
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last night I sat cross-legged on the floor of the small Brooklyn apartment where I live with mom and abuela, guitar in my lap, a song in my head I haven’t finished yet. outside, the city hummed its usual lullaby — sirens, wind, someone yelling too far away to understand. inside, just me, chasing chords…
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in group the other day, we were doing this mindfulness practice — focusing on an object or scene, really letting yourself see it, the texture, the light, and edges. the quiet stuff your brain skips past most days. someone pointed out a single cloud moving past the window. we all looked. then a man, maybe…
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I read this in a book I checked out of the library: out of all the stations on the New York City Subway, 275 are fully underground. that’s 59%. add a couple more percent and you get 61% riding beneath the surface. the rest — elevated, embanked, open-cut — see sky. but most of us…
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four days a week. almost every week this year. I’ve added up the minutes — over 3,000 of them so far — in the recovery support group, in the chair across from my therapist, in the waiting room at the clinic with its flickering light, the hum of an old vending machine, and an odd…
cookie nieves 