[Verse]

Yo, December twenty-fifth, the house is feeling hollow, low

Every vow he ever made I watched him fail to follow through

Mama's mixing medication with her daily bottle, so

She can cope with all the hurt until she's numb and swallow slow

Says tomorrow she'll recover but tomorrow never comes around

Just another broken promise that she's burying underground

I'm unwrapping all this baggage like it's gifts beneath the tree

Decorating dysfunction, wrapping paper's misery

Hanging ornaments of abandonment on branches of my family tree

Every bulb's a bitter memory burning holes in front of me

Tinsel made of tension, garland strung with daddy's lies

Silent night but nothing's silent when I hear my mama cry

Learned the art of poker faces while I'm dying on the inside

Smiling through the agony, a master of the disguise

Christmas dinner's arguments and slurred words from the drunk

Wishing I could disappear, dissolve into my bunk

Thirteen different motels by the time that I turned ten

Every eviction notice was a gift I'd never send

Cousins got the Barbies, I got baggage and a burden

Watching grown-ups pop their pills behind a barely closed curtain

Empty chairs... empty rooms...

...

Nobody came... nobody knew...

...

I'm still here... barely though...

...

Tell me when... can I go...

(can I go... can I go...)

[Verse]

Fast forward to fifteen, found my mother's medicine cabinet

Thought if I could feel like nothing, I could finally manage it

Swallowed down her secrets just to stomach all the damage, shit

Got so good at being numb, I made a language out of savage splits

Between the girl I was supposed to be and who I actually became

A carbon copy catastrophe of everybody's pain

See, addiction was hereditary, passed down like the china plates

Except we pawned the dishes just to medicate the mental breaks

Seventeen with track marks, eighteen with regrets

Twenty-one in meetings, twenty-two with cigarettes

Trying to escape the cage but the cage was in my DNA

Every generation trapped inside the same display

Of self-destruction, substance function, nothing's ever quite enough

Love was always conditional on whether times were rough or tough

And they were always rough and tough, so love was always out of reach

Just another lesson that the broken people teach

I'm the student and the teacher, I'm the sinner and the saint

Trying to break the cycle with these words inside my paint

Every bar's a battle scar, every verse is therapy

Rapping out my trauma is the only thing that's set me free

Empty chairs... empty rooms...

...

Nobody came... nobody knew...

...

I'm still here... barely though...

...

Tell me when... can I go...

Some days...

...I'm slipping back...

...

Some days...

...I stay on track...

...

Some days...

...I want what I never had...

...

But most days...

...I'm just... glad I'm here...

[Verse]

Now I'm twenty-something, staring at my own reflection

Questioning if I'm my mother or my father's true projection

Or maybe I'm the anomaly, the one who breaks the chains the first one in my bloodline who can sit with all the pain without dissolving into powder liquid vape or smoke without needing something foreign just to help me cope ya I still got triggers ya I still got scars ya I still spend Decembers wishing on the stars that maybe things were different, that my childhood wasn't stolen, that my parents knew the weight of love, without being so broken, but wishes don't erase the past, they only highlight what's gone, so I take my pain and flip it into something I can build upon, these verses are my victory, these rhymes are my resistance, every word's a middle finger to the path of least resistance, I refuse to be a statistic, refuse to repeat the pattern, refuse to pass the trauma down and watch the next generation shatter, so this Christmas when the loneliness comes creeping in my door, I'll remember I'm the victor in the psychologic war, no presents under the tree but I'm present in my mind and that presence is the greatest gift that I can ever find. Empty Chairs, but I'm here, made it through another year, still standing, still fighting, silver lining.