Our Town

In our town, little girls do meth with their mothers. By the time we're twelve we've smoked and fucked, and there never really was much hope for us to start with. 

In our town, smoking shit is a family event, like Sunday dinner or a competitive game of Monopoly.

Being clean for two weeks is something to write home about. 

Most of us in our town had at least one junkie parent and that never really leaves us. We see someone coming down or yelling nonsense in public and we go into fight or flight mode. 

In our town the cops don't do their jobs until someone gets hurt, and we play a game called 'firework or gunshots', chase ambulances and firetrucks because we're addicted to the feeling of knowing that other people are suffering with us.

Most of us are mentally ill, but afraid to ask for help for fear of being ridiculed for showing an ounce of real human emotion, aside from yelling outside the gas station that we're gonna kick each other's fucking asses.

A lot of us blow our fucking brains out.

Some of us get out and suffer from survivors guilt. Some of us make it out before we become teenage crack baby factories, or junkies...we're alive. But something always feels off.

In our town, a few of us save ourselves, but we can't save them all, no matter how deep we reach for a sliver of maternal instinct. 

Sometimes it feels like it's written in the fucking cosmos.

Grandmother, Uncle, Aunt, Mother, Sister, Daughter.

An unbreakable cycle out of our control. 

It's hard to see the good in people when you've been to our town. When you've heard kids cry because they still crave love from their piece of shit parents.

When you see drugs take another generation. 

In our town, the cycles are stronger than good intentions.