By Astrid Fernandes
I press the glass to my lips,
and the burn—sharp, holy, blasphemous
rivers down my throat like a prayer I never meant to whisper.
They say it’s aged in oak,
but all I taste is rust,
a metallic hymn of something ancient, something gone.
Something that tastes like blood.
I drink to forget, but memory is a stubborn ghost.
It lingers in the amber,
in the weight of the glass,
in the way the ice clinks like broken promises
chiming against each other, laughing at the wreckage.
I drink, and the world warps,
but pain is a shape-shifter—
it learns to swim when you drown it.
They say it numbs.
They say it heals.
They say it makes you feel lighter,
but lightness is an illusion when you're already made of smoke.
When the bottle runs dry,
all that’s left is the truth slamming back into you—
a freight train in slow motion,
crushed ribs, cracked spirit,
the bitter aftertaste of regret curling in your gums.
Tastes like blood.
And yet, I go back.
A pilgrim to the altar of oblivion.
I sip, I sink, I disappear—
because it is easier than staying.
Because reality is a jagged thing,
and I have never learned to hold it without bleeding.
But tell me, tell me, tell me—
When does the drowning, become the thirst?
When does the cure become the curse?
When does the thing that holds you up
become the thing that drags you under?
I put the glass down.
Let the silence settle.
Let the rawness sit in my mouth, unwashed, untouched.
I run my tongue along my teeth,
the taste of something metallic, something real,
something I can’t drink away.