House Split By Smoke

The house was never just walls,

it was a battlefield.

Rooms echoed with slammed doors,

with secrets whispered behind palms,

with bottles tucked into cupboards that should have held bread.

Addiction sat at the head of the table, it raised its glass in place of a blessing,

turned dinners into arguments, and birthdays into funerals.

We stopped gathering.

We stopped trusting.

We stopped being a family and instead became fragments orbiting the same wound.

Estrangement crept in quietly,

a father who never called, a mother who disappeared, siblings who couldn’t wait to turn eighteen.

We grew up learning absence as if it were a second language, learning love as something that left without warning.

Generational trauma is not just what is done,

it is what is repeated.

A father’s silence becomes a son’s rage.

A mother’s needle becomes a daughter’s fear.

We inherit not heirlooms, but ghosts, and each child carries them forward,

believing the curse is fate.

And yet,

I write this to say the story does not have to end here.

That blood is not a prison,

that even broken homes can produce hands strong enough to build anew.

Even estranged families cannot erase the stubborn bloom of one voice rising, saying:

I will not be another echo.

But the truth remains;

addiction was the fracture, the dividing line, the knife passed down.

And we are left holding both blade and wound, deciding;

with trembling hands, whether to cut again or to finally put it down.