A house can be loud without a sound
Children of Alcoholics
A house can be loud without a sound.
Footsteps soft as questions
But no one answers.
We are the Children of Alcoholics,
learning early how to read the weather
in a face,
how to map danger in the tilt of a glass.
There is a pain of loss before our parent dies,
a slow eclipse that never quite finishes,
light dimmed but not gone,
just enough to keep hoping.
The grief of not being enough
sits with us at the table
It pulls up a chair uninvited,
whispers between bites:
Why do they not love me enough to stop?
Rooms remember things.
Doors that closed too hard,
laughter that turned sharp,
the echo of being left behind
even while standing in the same place.
We grow tall without shade,
not given life wisdom,
only fragments,
only instincts sharpened by survival.
And somewhere deep,
a quiet, burning contradiction:
the guilt of hating the parent,
love tangled in thorns,
bleeding either way you hold it.
The world outside feels unpredictable,
like home once did,
so we carry that map with us,
being scared of situations
that others call ordinary.
We sip carefully from our own lives,
aware of the edge,
having a difficult relationship with alcohol,
as if it knows our name
before we speak it.
In crowded rooms,
we stand like unsent letters,
hearts folded inward,
struggling in social environments,
trying to translate a language
we were never taught.
And still—
somewhere beneath the wreckage—
there is a stubborn, quiet pulse:
a child who deserved warmth,
who still does,
who always did.
Lee
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