At ten years old, they told me a pill would fix the broken clock inside my head. They promised focus. They promised stillness. They didn't tell me I'd have to trade my own soul for it.

First, I learned to swallow the static, to be the good, numb boy whose perfect grades made everyone proud. Then, I learned to sell that quiet in the locker room, to crush up the promises and chase a different kind of light. And when that light wasn't enough, I found a new god in a shard of glass-a terrible, electric fire that burned away the boy I was, and the boy I was pretending to be.

These poems are what's left after the blaze. This book is the black box recording of that fall, a map of the road from a doctor's signature to a shattered windshield. It's a story of how a cure can become its own disease, and what it feels like to stand in the wreckage, breathing, and begin the quiet work of seeing who you are now.