If I was the only reason for you to stay clean, what does that make me?

I feel like I was a rule you wanted to break. A chain for you to pull on.

I wish I could have been the difference I needed in you. But there's no reasonable way for me to hold myself responsible for your change.

Heaven and hell both know you would rather leave than be responsible for mine.

So in what fairness is it that I take charge of your life?

I cannot be the cure for your lifestyle. I cannot be held responsible for your sobriety and your relapse all wrapped up in one resentful package.

I wanted so badly for us to share our growth. But the expectation we both set for each other now seems like it was rooted in desperation and spite.

Wasted life like mine trying to be the splint you use to graft your life together and hold it fast while you grow, feels like a fence trying to stop a tree from expanding.
Stunting your growth and breaking me in the process, to no avail.

Bark engulfing my time-fragile frame of linked cage, hopelessly there to keep you safe. Your strong life breaking and bending my twisted metal body, determined to taste the poisoned stream on the other side of my weathered wire you see so clearly as prison bars. Awaiting my mistake as to justify a sip of the lethal spring so close to your roots.

I so desperately have tried to keep you safe from those toxic waters you are so dedicated to live by. I've tried, and I have failed, to be the source of your change.

My broken and mangled wire will lay to rust on the river bank, while I watch your roots soak up the volatile liquid you so desperately seek. Then shrivel up and rot while my brittle iron oxide body hopelessly decays and cries rust atop your dying trunk. Wishing something had been different.

You didn't choose to live so close to the water, but I chose to make one last stand surrounding your body like a prison of demands. It isn't your fault that your here, but it's my fault for thinking my life could stop you.

-RÆ