By eighteen, the pills had become too expensive and too scarce. That’s when heroin found him—or rather, when he walked into its open arms. The first time he injected, he vomited and wept. The second time, he smiled. The third time, he stopped being Liam altogether.
He relapsed on a rainy Thursday, in the basement of a house he was renting with three other lost boys. He had been clean for eleven months. One phone call from an old using buddy. One text: Come through. Got the good stuff. And just like that, the scaffolding of his recovery collapsed. the boy who lost himself to drugs
His name was Liam. Or at least, it used to be. Now, when people in town whisper about him—if they whisper about him at all—they just call him “that boy.” The one who used to have it all. The one who threw it away. By eighteen, the pills had become too expensive
The saddest part? Liam is still alive. But the boy he used to be—the one who laughed too loud, who loved too hard, who dreamed of playing guitar on a stage—that boy died a long time ago. He just forgot to stop breathing. The second time, he smiled
Somewhere, in a high school auditorium, a boy like Liam is sitting in the back row, already wondering what it would feel like to disappear. And somewhere, a mother is setting the table for a son who will never come home.