I will quit tomorrow I say it every night
like a prayer that doesn’t ask to be answered.
I line the words up carefully,
as if discipline lives in syntax,
as if repetition alone can cauterize habit.
Smoke curls through my grief
slow, intimate, irreversible.
Each drag is an apology I don’t finish,
each exhale a promise I fold and pocket
for later, for morning, for a version of me
that wakes up cleaner.
My lungs know my losses by name.
They carry them in ash and ache,
in that hollow burn that feels earned,
like punishment agreed upon in advance.
I will quit tomorrow, I tell myself
the smoke, the grief,
the practiced act of letting people down,
the selfishness dressed up as escape.
I don’t like the person in the mirror.
Tomorrow, I won’t be you.
Tomorrow is clean, hypothetical, forgiving.
But I’m what patience runs out on,
a gradual undoing of expectation.
Not all at once; that would be honest.
Just enough each day to be deniable.
Just enough to say I’m trying
while striking the match anyway.
Tomorrow waits patiently at the edge of my bed
while I sink back into the rabbit hole,
scraping my knuckles on its walls.
This is just one more night.
The affirmation survives; I don’t.
I wake up already bargaining,
already reaching,
already tired of being someone
who keeps surviving the same mistake.
I will quit tomorrow, I say again,
because belief is easier when it’s postponed,
because hope feels safer when it never has to prove itself.
And the hole tightens,
oddly familiar and mercifull
holding me until night falls.
I say it once more
like it means something this time.