There’s a version of life I always was picturing when i was 16, a house, a family that looked like it was out of a movie script, like my giant family as a kid when I was young I thought I would have that. But years passed and I looked up and ended up as someone else entirely. This song came out of that gap. It’s not comfortable to share, but it’s honest, and honest is the only kind of writing I know how to do anymore, its a raw demo recorded on a field recorder then worked in cubase with some effects and compression.

Lyrics

I want a house with a movie-script family, but instead I’m boxed inside a drug-stained apartment stacked high with regrets.

In my lonely chair, I rehearse old dreams, but time presses its boot on my back, crushing the last pieces of who I thought I’d become.

Dirty carpet. Mold-rotted sinks. Family heirlooms buried in dust and shame. Clothes twenty years old, folded like memories that never changed.

Photos of the past hang around my neck like a noose. Tears gather on the pile of bills that keep me anchored here.

Polished instruments — untouched, avoided — because I can’t face the songs they’d try to drag out of me.

Rooms arranged with objects I think “normal people” own, to pretend I still know how to be normal.

Burned-out light bulbs. Stolen toilet paper from the market down the street. An empty kitchen, because the drugs ate the food budget again.

The living room is my home gym: pacing back and forth until the madness shakes loose.

The bedroom is my grave: a dug-out pit where I’ve spent too many years wondering what if, and never getting out to try.

So many times I’ve clawed out of death’s box, made it a few steps ahead before God cracks the ground in front of me, reminding me I still owe penance for every sin I’ve tried to outrun.

No one visits. My cheap tricks burn out fast. People stay safe by staying far away.

You can tell I’m spiraling by the hair I don’t cut, the clothes I don’t wash, the days I hide indoors waiting for a door — any door — to open me back into the world.

If I could escape this life I fake satisfaction in, I would. If I had the courage for a normal day, I’d be a better human than whatever broken shadow I’ve become.

I walk a path to death — the devil’s gift, wrapped as an escape. Late-night madness. Sun-lit days slept through. Sometimes I look forward to my own ending more than I look forward to anything else.

Take away the 2 a.m. messages I send to ghosts — old faces I wouldn’t even recognize now — hoping one might say they’re glad to hear from me. Hope is a foolish god; it demands loyalty and gives nothing in return.

No one answers my nostalgic pleas to feel like I did years before I lost myself to whatever the hell I am today.

So I stay here, waiting for the next eviction notice, holding the lights on because I’m terrified of closing my eyes and dying alone in this bed, never having a family beside me.

Matthew Haubert— Fracture & Form