A wide-eyed kid, aged nineteen;
Bottled rage, a kind unseen.
Then, a sudden light beam burst forth;
Like it was a song of ice and fire,
And the Mad Queen met the ******* of the North.

I was killing myself with drugs and *****;
I still am. But, back then,
I was permanently binging.
I had nothing to lose;
I was a soul running loose,
With no clues about all these blues.
Short-fused and self-abused,
And extremely ******* confused.

But then, she showed up;
I hesitantly slowed down.
I was a mine about to blow up,
Whilst she upturned my frown.
At least, that’s what happened, for a while;
It wasn’t long before vitriol and bile.

We were living wild, all functional survival.
Sharing shelter with a woman who was vile;
A mother twisted and snarled up with hate,
A completely ****** up fate complementing a ****** up life.

Somehow, amid the *****, unwashed dishes,
The stench of alcoholism and all the hitches,
The sting of a mother ignoring a daughter’s wishes,
This was when we were the happiest together.
We had nobody, nothing, except for each other.

Bonding over an enemy in common;
Us against the world, baby.
I felt like an angel had been summoned;
I thought I’d won the golden ticket,
Until I realised the paper was laced with a tracer of poison,
And we were getting sickened.

But, during that first year, we were alright;
Hell was around us, but not inside us.
Walking through fire, but not set alight.
We held on; for each other, we went soft,
Like I was Indiana Jones, and you were Lara Croft.

We struggled, we survived, although we never thrived.
We lost everyone around us; remember how I cried?
Our friends, gone with the wind,
They dropped us, or we dropped them,
Like a benefit one rescinds.

We clawed our way out of that black hole,
Said goodbye to the drunk skunk on the couch,
A merry day to get away from that blackened soul.
We had no plans, no real goals;
We were just running away,
And starting anew on our own.

Filled with hope, so open to the world;
So naïve, believing we’d be able to cope.
We’d give it a whirl, we said, holding one another’s hand.
We were lost, like wayward, wind-strewn grains of sand.
But, somehow, we slept fondly in each other’s arms,
Disarmed wholly by each other’s charms.
I loved you, and never wished you any harm.
I gave you all I had and all I knew;
I wish it was enough to get us through.