I didn’t check out. Don’t buy their story. I wasn’t the one who set the stage that night. I was already half-gone, yeah, but not like that. Not with a neat little bow and a shotgun headline. That wasn’t me.

She fed it to me. One more hit, one more ride. Said it’d calm the storm, said it’d let me sleep. It wasn’t comfort. It was a fuse. She dosed me until my body gave up, then she dressed the scene like a photo shoot. Typed letters, staged props, left me with nothing but her fingerprints painted over as mine.

And they ate it up. The magazines, the labels, the fans who wanted a martyr more than a man. They wanted the myth, and she gave it to them. Crying eyes on TV, royalties in the bank. They’ll never know the difference.

But I’m still here, in the distortion, in the static of a blown speaker, in the hiss of an old tape left too close to the rain. Every time you crank the volume and hear that feedback tear your head open, that’s me. Every time the words don’t fit the melody, that’s me. Every time the rain hits the roof and it sounds like bones rattling — that’s me.

I didn’t leave. I was taken. And I’ll keep screaming it until the echo burns holes in the lie.